“My Perfectly Normal Trip To IKEA” - Part Seven

Part Seven

“My Perfectly Normal Trip To IKEA” by _1979_twilight_

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————————PART SEVEN————————

I’m standing in the hallway staring at the door.

I want to piss my pants.

I want to find some way to discreetly dispose of myself entirely.

I can’t do this. I can’t.

I can barely keep my eyes open. I feel like I’m staring at the sun.

I just got a text.

(You should be in character. If you need a second, take it outside, and then get your shit together. Once you open that door, it stays open, and you’re doing this.)

Please cry. Please. Please start crying.

Another.

(You already said yes, there’s no room left for you to say no.)

Alright, I’ll be honest with you, I really do feel so chronologically disoriented from my vacation to The Warehouse. How about we assume I was there for two days, and just double it to account for the pain and misery of four horrific days squished into two.

Sound like a plan? Dope.

Cody Camargo: Twenty-one days in.

——————

So, good news/bad news.

Bad news: I woke up again.

Good news: I don’t really feel like I’m going to vomit up jet fuel. Is that good news, or just news? Most people’s “good news” is not usually the absence of a severely obvious negative. Trust me, the fact that I woke up at all is bad news.

I think I feel better, marginally. Or at least as good as I can feel after having a lingering concussion, broken rib, falling down a sky-scraping escalator, being almost completely deprived of food and water for “two” days, living next to and practically in a septic tank for those same “two” days, being asphyxiated, being beaten within an inch of my life AGAIN, being trampled by an overachieving Staff member, whatever the actual-storybook-hell had happened inside of my stomach, and of course, a punch and kick in the face to welcome me back to this wonderful community.

Remember when I tried to stop saying the word “infinite”? I’m gonna do you a favor, and make it a bottom line that I’m in a pretty consistent physical misery of hellish proportions. That way, I can save you the gratuitous mention of it. Just let it be known that from here on out, until stated otherwise, I would much rather be dead.

Besides, I don’t want to complain too much. What would make it a fun visit to R&E if not the pain of everything I experienced before losing consciousness returning all in one instant?!

“…fffffuck mmmme…”

Preferably senseless.

——————

My notebook is gone (you know the blatant catch to that, but live in the moment with me). I can’t feel it under my shirt. I also can’t feel the weight of my phone in my pocket. I know I hadn’t dropped it on my way back, but even if I had, I don’t feel like I would care very much.

My arms are back in their respective holsters of rope and chair-limb. I might feel more dignified in medieval stocks than repeatedly winding up in this goddamn chair. I didn’t try to lift my head. I didn’t feel any need to see my concrete studio apartment again. The cold steel of the table was giving my head such a romantically gentle hug of relief. Lord knows goddamn well I deserved it.

I’m sure that quite soon, whichever one of them that feels the need to berate me will do so. I don’t think I could care less about that if I had literally been lobotomized while I was unconscious. I don’t care about what they want to do with me, or whether or not they want to kill me, or if they want to hurt me if I’m not being cooperative, or about being cooperative for anything other than helping them throw me to my own death. Right now, what I care about is taking a nap, until I hopefully fade back into a coma-like-blackout for the next fifty years or so.

——————

A hand slammed down on the table like an alarm clock. I sighed deeply and realized that a nap wasn’t possible.

They just keep getting friendlier.

I raised my head to see that the hyperbolic one with no Y chromosome & the giant samurai were staring at me.

(Quick annoying note that I feel I have to address:

From where I’m sitting, his name is Roman. I don’t expressly dislike that name, but I was having much more fun catcalling him with random aliases to take my childish anger out on a member of this group. I’m just gonna list all of the names that I would have liked to make fun of him with at some point or another. This is a referential monstrosity, so the whole list will just be bookended as such.

(RA)

Buff Kirito (his hair isn’t black)
Conan The Barbarian
ABC Lightning Eating Thunder Crapping XYZ
Samurai Jack
Tank Masaki (I like this one a lot)
Dante
Robert The Bruce Banner (I mean, Christ)
Beowulf
Ike (Fire Emblem, not Turner)
Ganondorf
All-Might
Kratos
Andre The Giant
The Liver King
Roman Reigns (I know I already made a Roman Reigns joke a lot earlier in this journal, but I wasn’t exactly privy to the fact that I would meet a guy named fucking “Roman”)
Stringbean (This is an ironic shame to throw away. Maybe I’ll still use it if the time is ever right)

(RA)

Cool, that’s out of my system).

I’m sure my hair-trigger ears would have heard the extremely loud door opening and closing, so I assumed they had already been standing over me for quite a while. I used this reasoning to agree with myself that they could be patient for a little longer. I’m worth the wait.

I slowly put my head back down on the table.

“I’m all good for now, guys,” I whispered. Thank you for asking, though.”

“Wake. Up. Now,” Her lovely voice stung through my ears.

“Suck. My-“

Before I could finish the sentence, I heard her bolting around the table. Roman ran to catch her by the wrist.

“Just a second,” He said.

I heard her groan in annoyance. I liked it a lot. After the room fell calm, my head was suddenly raised up by the hair.

“Ow! Get off of-….” I winced.

I could technically talk again, but exclaiming in any way was still a big nono. He pulled my torso up and tossed me to the back of the chair. I let my head slump limply down to my chest. He scoffed, as he grabbed it by the cheeks and forced me to come eye to eye with him.

“Hey, look at this,” He said.

In his other hand, he waved a bottle of water in front of me like I was a toddler looking at a stuffed animal. It worked. I probably looked like I was seeing a naked woman for the first time.

“Dooo you want it?” He taunted.

I really didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of gratitude. Let it be clear, I didn’t want to be breathing still, but as long as I was, I would’ve preferred to not be in misery. The sight of that water bottle was almost exciting me to a sexual degree.

“I think you need it,” He added.

What was I going to do, act like I was too tough for terminal dehydration? Well, I tried to anyway. My eyes rolled and drifted away from him down to the table.

“How do you have the energy to be so annoying-“ He said.

“-Just shove it down his throat if you think he needs it so bad-why are you giving him the choice-“ She snarked.

“-Can you just let me talk to him?!”

A little smile creeped onto my face. I looked slowly back at him as I let it bloom into my cheeks.

“Water’s boring… I’d rather have you spit in my mouth,” I hissed to him seductively.

He slammed the water down on the table and let my head drop down roughly. I chuckled rabidly as he paced away from me.

“Good talking, genius,” She said to him.

I lifted my head back up and looked towards her. I stared into her eyes as they fixed on me. They were still horrifying, but I felt incredibly free to let that chill run up my spine. I could enjoy looking at her all I wanted when I didn’t care if she beat me to death or not. It was so much fun. I felt like I had just taken a shot of adrenaline. She was wearing a tight black sweater that I let my eyes drift to the center of.

“What the hell are you looking at?!” She growled.

“I was just waiting for you to offer me your saliva instead,” I replied happily.

She genuinely reeled back a little, like her anger wasn’t enough to justify even being in my proximity. That was a familiar feeling. Doing it to her felt so… empowering.

“I’d let you give it to me anyway you want,” I added, letting my tongue peek out of my mouth.

Roman didn’t stop her as she stormed up to me and buried her fist into my rib.

——————

I couldn’t even scream, because I was just in such utter physical disbelief of the sensation I just experienced. I froze to the spot with my mouth agape, as a small creaking sound crawled from my throat.

“Fucking creep,” Roman said.

I managed to pry my eyes back up to her face. She still looked angry, but with a more potent disgust sprouting somewhere in the back of her head. She’d expected a timid, repenting dog with its tail between its legs after our last meeting.

“I dare you to say some shit like that again,” She spat. “You don’t have a sack to hold the balls for it.”

I assumed that was her attempt to out-sexual-harass me.

“Holding on to this bit for dear life-we get it, you’re uncooperative,” She continued. “It’s not cute, it’s not impressive. It’s embarrassing. You should be embarrassed.“

I tried to breathe through the shockwaves billowing around my side. I didn’t enjoy that punch at all, so don’t misconstrue what I’m about to say. Somehow in there, I really began to enjoy myself. Physically tormenting as it was quickly proving to be, being the little shit these two saw me as was unbelievably amusing.

Roman walked back up to the table.

“Is that enough attention for you to stop being a brat?” He asked me.

I spoke down to the table rather than to him.

“I think I’m almost there….. maybe if she tries hitting a little harder,” I said as I looked up to her. “Just because you pick a cheap spot, doesn’t mean you can punch like a bitch.”

She must have been too beside herself to bother rebuking that, as her hand went right to her waist instead.

“This is such a waste of time,” she said, as she slipped the beretta out from her belt.

I giggled.

“Heheh, can I get a good cop around this place or what?”

She looked to Roman.

“You have any objection to speeding this up?” She asked.

“Um…. I think I’ve got one more honest try left in me,” He replied.

They both looked slowly back to me.

“You wanna tell us what happened out there?” He asked me.

“Since you’re so nice….. I was out on a hunting trip. White-tails are grazing like a convention out there.”

She walked up to me and put the muzzle to my temple.

“How about now?” She asked him.

“Doesn’t sound like he actually wants a good cop.”

“No shit,” She said, looking back at my temple. “Be honest with me. Is this a joke to you because you’re bored, or are you asking for something?”

Perfect violet.

“Am I not entertaining you?” She said, “If you really want this, I promise that I am unbelievably liberated to make a tunnel in your skull.”

I hoped it wasn’t an empty threat, but I stopped enjoying myself quite quickly. She was really good at making me angry.

“Did someone tell you that you’re scary because you can threaten to kill something?”

“Excuse me?” She said,

I fully turned to her, pressing my forehead to the barrel myself.

“How often do you show that shit off to everyone here? You shouldn’t have it out like it’s nothing. A kid could steal it and shoot someone, or shoot themselves. Do you want a small child bleeding to death because you’re a self-obsessed maniac who wants everybody to think she’s so tough?”

I saw her other fist curling shakily.

“You’re such a fucking pussy,” I said.

She chuckled a little before quickly stifling it. That was a laugh of delirium.

“You should know about a child bleeding out,” She said.

——————

I felt a bizarre inability to move as a tumorous pit appeared in my stomach.

“Wha… what did you just say?” I asked. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Twelve year-old girl comes back incapacitated in buckets of blood, what do you think I mean-“

“-it’s…. not hers-why would it be hers-what are you saying?-“

“-just stop, I don’t want you to feel any obligation to tell me anything. If you don’t want the truth to come out of your mouth while you’re still alive, I’m not gonna grill you for it. If playing dumb is really that important to you-“

“-What truth-you said bleeding out. You said I should know about a child bleeding out-why are you saying that? The blood isn’t hers because she wasn’t bleeding! Why are you lying?!”

My heart had quickly kicked up the stick-shift. Her eyes widened as her finger reached the realization of that pulse. Her smile returned proudly.

“Lying? Is that what you think I’m doing? Is that how your little walnut brain protects itself? What am I lying about? I don’t think I ever made a statement about her current health……. is that maybe what you’re talking about?“

She was bluffing. She couldn’t have been that heartless about it, but even if she was joking…

“You’re actually psychotic...”

“Am I? Am I the one taunting parents with their child’s body on the deathbed? Reunited just so he can lose her a second time? Am I the one doing that?”

There was a sickening silence.

“See, there’s false hope, and then there’s a sick joke,” She said. “Can you guess which one ‘bringing a child twelve hours from death back to their already grieving father’ is?”

——————

I slipped so quickly. She leaned closer to me as she spoke with a conniving sarcasm.

“What’s the matter, Cody?” She said, “Why’d you stop having fun all of a sudden?”

She tapped the gun on my forehead a couple times before letting it swing down away from me.

“What’s going on in there?” She taunted.

Deathbed… how could that be true?

“Just…….” I whispered.

“Huh? Say it again?”

“….. just… tell me you’re lying… what…. what’s happening to her?”

She laughed in my face.

“Happening?! You don’t think it’s already happened?”

“HEY!” Roman yelled as we both looked towards him.

His face was still cold, but his stance was so apprehensive that you would think there was a bear in the room with us.

“I don’t… like this,” He said to her. “This isn’t speeding up anything, what are we doing here?”

She sighed and backed away from me slightly.

“Scared straight program wasn’t working. I wanted to try something more invasive.”

“You mean psychological?” He returned.

My head shot back to her, as I refused to let my brain process what it thought had just been implied. I slowly looked back at Roman. His eyes met mine.

“Elizabeth… Elizabeth is fine. She’s definitely malnourished, but she’s mostly just shaken up. Sa- our um, nurse says that a day and some change should be enou forsndbn sknmf doehdhf dkebdbj skakbfu pqoe choql xoan ddkn foagdb fkqucb aicbfu gn dbai cowbfg xmeowb aodb fhai cbei bfjf cmdo wjdbf fmfk qomnv bbaifm finno zbaif mov abfi fbaicm omgp pqmfh vria cklw hdk fmmffmm mf fmm fmmm mff fffm mmmmf mfm

——————

Roman kept talking for quite a long time. I think I remember it sounding like he was trying to reassure me. I had tuned him out within the first ten seconds as his voice became a blur.

I should have been a shaking mess, but I was dead-still. Even with all the jumbled calamity taking place in every molecule of my decaying body, every single piece of my make-up unanimously shifted their focus to the tick that has just sprouted in my head.

A little flake of my brain twisted in a way that it definitely was not supposed to. I’m not sure exactly where the line in a 21st-century human’s mind is that separates us from Neanderthals, but I felt something cross it. I felt an animalistic rage place its palms on my shoulders and whisper in my ear. It gently turned my chin to look at her.

To look at that disgusting pitiful lying manipulative careless cold unfeeling arrogant pompous bloodless little horsefly piece of-

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!”

The scream that went through me was a nice halfway to the sensation I had experienced from throwing up blood. That only fueled the ire.

“YOU PUT THAT BODY IN MY HEAD THEN LAUGH LIKE IT’S A JOKE-LET ME OUT OF THIS CHAIR-“

“-Hey! Stop it!” Roman yelled to me.

“ARE YOU TRYING TO GET ON MY LEVEL BECAUSE YOU THINK I’M OFF SOME KIND OF DEEP END?! ARE YOU JUST TESTING HOW FUCKING SPINELESS YOU CAN BE?!”

The sound of my voice was so unfamiliar to me that it was jump-scaring me every time I let it out. I was making a noise that begged me to stop speaking, let alone wailing.

“SOULLESS BITCH-I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WOULD DO THAT! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE THAT SICK-DO YOU THINK THAT LYING ABOUT A KID’S DEATH IS A NORMAL MANEUVER?! DO YOU THINK THAT’S CLEVER?! DO YOU THINK THAT’S A-“

My throat made a sound that couldn’t have possibly been human, as I began coughing hysterically. I hacked down into my lap with my eyes watering up. I couldn’t tell if I still had the ability to breathe with the entrance to my throat bubbling up like an allergic reaction. I wanted to keep screaming until I could never speak again. I wanted my last words to be in service of that disgust.

She did it. It was unbelievably impressive how easily she had reversed our roles. Congratulations, you killed my sense of humor. I just don’t understand why you had to use that bullshit to do it…

I was there for a minute. I had been in a world where I hadn’t done it, where I hadn’t saved her. Everything that had happened meant nothing. All the chaos and anger was just for me to fail… just for Elizabeth to be taken a second time. Even a second of that feeling was just like being down there in The Warehouse again.

Nick running away. Elizabeth motionless in my arms. Surrounded by a darkness full of a nightmare more powerful than I could ever imagine being able to fight.

——————

A hand appeared on my chin as my head was lifted up slowly. I looked up to Roman.

“Can you stop screaming? I don’t want to clean up a puddle of black bile again,” He said to me.

“You didn’t clean it up the first time,” She prodded.

Roman looked over at her angrily.

“I need you to step down a little, or I’m just gonna leave,” He said to her.

I heard her scoff, but say nothing in response. He turned back to me.

“You’re still pissing me the fuck off……. but I’m sorry she said that to you,” He said.

——————

He picked up the water again.

“Can you drink this…… please?”

I stared at him for a couple seconds, and looked over to the water. I looked away, but I slowly opened my mouth.

Roman sighed in relief as he opened the water and slowly grabbed my head again. He gently set the nozzle on my bottom lip. Slowly, he tipped the tiniest wave into my mouth.

Incredible is a stupid word in comparison to what it was. I won’t even try, it’s impossible. It is impossible to describe what it was like to have water enter my body for the first time in God knows how long.

You know how tolerance works for a person that barely ever ingests any kind of influential substance?

I coughed just from the water hitting my tongue. He pulled away the bottle so that I couldn’t spill it like a dumbass. He let me fight through the fit for a while. Even the couple of droplets that I retained in my mouth were a cold shower of relief.

I looked back up to him desperately, done with playing like I didn’t need the charity. He brought it back to my lip. As the next volley slid past my teeth, I let it roll to the back. I was horrified of trying to swallow. I wanted to just let my mouth absorb the liquid and pray that it decided to travel to the rest of my body. It felt like the struggle of urging your body to swallow a giant pill.

I winced as I gulped, finding I was correct to fear that it would feel like razor blades. Goddamn, it was the most delicious bottle of razor blades I had EVER tasted.

He slid me a bigger sip as I fought it down.

“Can you tell me if you’re gonna choke so it doesn’t end up on me?”

I swallowed the sip and squinted my eyes at him.

“How would I do that with my body tied up?”

“Just blink or something, asshole.”

The Girl stayed silent and watched us as we continued. It took us about ten patient minutes until the water bottle was finished.

He backed away from me as I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. Neither of them poked at me like I was expecting them to right away. I didn’t want to let go of the anger that was still lining my stomach, but I opened my eyes for a different reason as I turned to The Girl.

“She’s thirteen.”

She raised an eyebrow to me.

“What?” She said,

“You called her a twelve year-old…… she’s thirteen.”

The two of them looked at each other as I mumbled wordlessly to myself. My voice was damaged. It was tired now, but even when it was “healed”, I could feel that there would be something permanently different.

“What do you actually want from me….. why am I even still alive?” I asked them.

They ignored me, or looked like they did, as they kept staring at each other, silently debating. These people seemed to do that a lot.

“Listen,” Roman began as he turned back to me. “We just need to know what happened to Elizabeth….. how she’s alive…… how you found her…..”

“…. that’s it?” I questioned.

“…for now,” He said.

Anyone up for a drinking game? I’d say you should drink whenever someone here says something unbelievably cryptic, but I think it’s only playable if we do it every time they DON’T.

“Does it matter? She’s back, and she’s alive. Isn’t that all you should care about?”

“If that was all there was to worry about, we would have found her ourselves, moron,” The Girl said without looking at me.

She was still staring at Roman quite unhappily. I was extending a similar glare towards her.

“The way Robert talked to you didn’t make it sound like you tried very hard to ‘find her’ at all,” I snapped at her.

She shot a look of daggers over at me before Roman interjected.

“Dammit stop, you both are annoying the hell out of me,” He said as he leaned on the table. “Just tell us where you found her.”

I was so tired. Even after Roman had just embarrassingly nursed my throat back to relative health, I still didn’t want to help them. I didn’t know how Lizzie’s whereabouts over the time of her missing was “helping” them, but I just wanted to collapse.

I knew The Girl had already realized the way out I was hoping for. Unless I was collapsing dead myself, I doubted she would let it happen for me.

——————

“She was in a hole.”

“A hole?” He asked.

“Yeah, just… a dark hole.”

“Okay…. what…. kind of hole?”

“I just sai-… a dark one-“

“-no I-ugh… I heard you. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but… there aren't exactly a lot of holes in the ground around here. How was she… logistically… in a hole?”

“I don’t know… I know she ran away from here but… she just said that she woke up in it. I don’t think she’s remembering right. I think she fell and hurt her head or something-“

“-I would like it if you would only say things that you know, and not what you think,” The Girl interrupted.

Jesus actual Christ.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to be talking,” I spat back at her.

“Is that what you heard?” She said as she looked to Roman. “Do me a favor, stop talking for a while.”

He stood silently in obedience. She looked back at me.

“What the hell kind of hole are you talking about? Where was it?”

I twitched angrily. She was just that desperately eager to reassume her control over the room that she needed to talk to him like a dog. I could pretend I was getting bored. Let’s just see what being civil is like.

“In whatever the hell that nightmare of a ‘downstairs’ is.”

They both gave each other a worried look. I knew that it meant something significant to them. Good for them.

“Okay, I… I will be however cooperative you want if you two stop looking at each other like that. It’s so stupid,” I said.

She rolled her eyes.

“Slow down on the attitude,” She said. “Was the hole in the floor?”

“Where the genuine hell else would a goddamn hole be-“

“-Think before you fucking speak to me!”

I was thinking about it pretty thoroughly.

“It was like the Shawshank Redemption, dude. It was just a weird hole in the ground that looked like somebody dug it with their goddamn teeth or something. I don’t know how specific you need me to be about an absence of space in a solid surface-“

“-well hang on, so what does that mean? She dug herself a burrow and you just-“

“-nonono, she didn’t dig it, it was already there. How would she have dug it-“

“-you didn’t say it was already there-what did you expect me to think?”

“Already there or not, no one person could have dug a hole that size. It was more like a room than a hole.”

She put her face in her hand and blew into it. Her bangs hovered gracefully for a moment.

“Alright…” She said before removing her hand. “How big are you talking here?”

“I… do you want measurements?”

Roman stayed silent, but closed his eyes in tired aggravation for the both of them.

“You know…” I started before looking around. “Imagine this room was kind of a sphere instead of a square, then…. make it the tiniest bit bigger.”

“Bigger?” She said,

“Yeah, maybe a third bigger-“

“-a third of this room is not the tiniest bit-and why-… no, it wasn’t that big,” She demanded.

“It was. Also deep. The room didn’t start until like fifteen feet down a chute-“

“-There’s just no w-…. No. A person would never have had the time to make something like that down there. Not before getting distracted-“

“-You’re not even listening to me-there was more than one person, and I’m not saying those people made it I’m just saying she wasn’t alone-“

“-oh shit, yeah,” Roman finally interrupted. “What the hell, I…. the other one. The one that was out there with you two that night!”

Nick. I hadn’t even thought about his current situation.

“Who? What ‘other one’?” She asked.

“The other one-the….” He paused to think. “The guy you were with. He was there when we opened the gate, wasn’t he?”

They’re asking me? Aren’t they supposed to be The Royal Guard? Yeah, they are. Why are they both acting confused?

“No shit he was. He ran inside. I’m surprised he’s not sitting next to me. Did you guys somehow run out of chairs in a fucking IKE-“

——————

“He….. ran inside didn’t he?” I said. “I saw him…….. where is he?”

Roman stared at me.

“I… I don’t know. If he was anything like you two he surely would’ve come in begging for help but…. nobody’s seen any new person-“

“-that woman!” I said a little too loud as I winced. I coughed a little. “Kek…. The one you told me to give Lizzie to, she must’ve seen him-he ran right by her. She screamed, I remember.”

He just slowly shook his head.

“I’m not sure if she remembers.…. I’ll have to ask her but…. we would have talked to him by now.”

I stared down at the table. I had barely known Nick for long enough to say that I “know” Nick, but that didn’t change my concern for him, little shit that he was. I had seen him run inside, I know I did. Didn’t I? I guess I could have imagined it, but what else would he be doing? Waiting outside? Wouldn’t he have just-

“He’s not here,” The Girl suddenly said confidently. “I would’ve seen him.”

How long can she go without being an egomaniac?

“Also, I’m glad you’ve got at least a little brain up there to know that he wouldn’t have been any different from you,” She added. “You shouldn’t even be here right now. He certainly wouldn’t have stayed.”

“What? Why?” I questioned.

“Did we just meet? Because I goddamn say so, that’s why. Can we get back on topic?-“

“-No. Is that your way of saying that you don’t care if he’s dead-“

“-is that a rhetorical question? Of course I’m saying that. Why would I care-“

“-Stop,” Roman said to no one in particular.

She briefly paused as we stared each other down. I wasn’t looking away anymore.

“How many people were there?” She asked.

“Seven. Including Lizzie and Kan-“ I started before breaking composure. “Where’s the dog?!-“

“-okay okay relax please… the dog is fine,” Roman said.

“Awww, the doggy,” She said sarcastically. “Do you wanna break the news to him, Caesar?”

I started jumping in the restraints before she could even finish her sentence. I wanted to scream again, but I opted to let my anger out on the rest of my aching body.

“Dammit dude, calm down-you’re gonna hurt yourself even more!” Roman yelled as he ran over and held me down in the chair.

“Let her say it. Let her say ‘it’s not staying’. ‘He’s not staying’ ‘they’re not staying’ ‘you’re not staying’. Fucking idiot-why don’t you write a mural on the outside wall that says ‘piss off’ to save people the time?”

She glared at me, but I saw the excitement in her eyes. It was the same excitement I had seen after I had punched her.

“You’re such an attention whore-we don’t have dog food. We have enough trouble taking care of humans,” She said.

“Just feed her anything who cares-

“-It’s an animal-we won’t know if it’s sick-we won’t know how to treat it if it is-“

“-I could, I took care of my dad’s dog with lethargy for two months-“

“-Oh please don’t add to my already infinite list of reasons to let you stay-“

“-oh my God-I’m not trying to negotiate for your stupid arts-and-crafts village-I’m telling you that anybody can take care of a dog-“

“-You’re not a veterinarian because your puppy was drowsy. That’s what domesticated animals do, they sleep-“

“-So what the hell is the problem with keeping one here-“

“-Because it’s not domesticated, it’s just a dog! It’s closer to a goddamn wolf-“

“-Tamaskans don’t have any wolf lineage-how could she be taken into an IKEA if she wasn’t domesticated?-“

“-It-doesn’t-have-a-fucking-collar-“

“-That doesn’t prove anything! If the jingle could’ve attracted the Staff, then somebody probably took it off-where is she right now?!”

“Dream on that I would ever tell you that-“

“-she’s with Lizzie isn’t she? Did you think about how Lizzie would feel if you threw Kanata out-“

“-She’s a kid, kids get over it-“

“-That one won’t-“

“-Shut up, you know nothing about her-“

“-And on that note, Kanata is a dog. So what do you think is gonna happen when you throw her out the front door? Because I’d say that she’s probably gonna sit there outside just waiting for it to open again until the day that she dies, which would probably be day one-“

“-SHUT UP AND LISTEN TO ME GODDAMIT!”

I sat silently for a moment as I watched her fire dancing erratically. Roman was silent, separated from the conversation at my side. She twitched slightly, but took a deep breath.

——————

“I need you to recognize that you’re not talking to Elijah anymore. I don’t know why he wants to feel so bad for you, but I’m fresh out of the fortitude to keep trying to understand. I cannot and will not exacerbate your effect on this place by being guilt-tripped about the well-being of a dog. I think your image of this ‘sanctuary’ has been greatly misrepresented, so I’ll just pull you out of The Twilight Zone here. Once someone is on the other side of that wall, they’re not our problem. There is no one person that’s worth two others. There is no life that’s worth even one other. No one is earning the ability to change my mind about that. This isn’t an organization for helping survivors, it’s just a box where survivors are. Not a family, not a team.”

——————

Two dots connected in my head. I was right before, Robert was definitely not the reason that Lizzie had such a harsh outlook on this place.

“No wonder Elizabeth is so pessimistic. What a callous bitch of a role model.”

She didn’t take a deep breath. She practically jumped forward to shove the gun into my mouth. I even heard Roman gasp.

“I really don’t know who the hell you think you are to talk to me like that,” She hissed. “Like you have any idea who I am-like you have any idea what I have to think about every day. You want me to feel like a bitch? You think you’re trailblazing by making me feel like I’m evil? Such a complex and original idea. Get over yourself.”

I gagged slightly as it brushed the back of my tongue. She leaned closer.

“You and that dog are no goddamn different,” She continued. “If anything, I’d rather feed the dog. The only thing I’m comfortable feeding you is sitting in your fucking mouth right now-“

Roman ran from beside me and grabbed her arm, pulling the pistol out of my mouth.

“STOP IT!” He screamed. “YOU’RE SCARING ME!”

She calmly looked up at him.

“Roman, get off of me,” She seethed. “Before I take the safety off.”

I started laughing.

——————

I wasn’t even delirious, I actually thought it was unbelievably hilarious. I laughed with my ramshackle excuse for a remaining voice. I laughed hard enough to almost piss myself. I laughed hard enough to re-threaten my injuries. I laughed like I was ready to die seconds later.

And I was.

They both were silent as I cackled.

——————

I calmed down and slowly looked up at her.

“She did it you know…. the blood. She killed a man.”

I saw Roman go sheet-white. The Girl stayed still, but I could see her flame being smothered.

“She bashed his skull in for minutes. She liked it, I could see it in her. She started doing it for safety and kept doing it for fun. She turned him into a fucking stain on the ground like it was nothing.”

——————

“You’re lying,” She said firmly.

I arched my back to stick my stomach out as much as I could.

“See this blood? Guess whose blood this is. Guess whose blood is all over her….. she did it right in front of me.”

She didn’t have anything to say. Big surprise. I did.

“‘No life is worth even one other….. I know… that’s why you’re just the same as me…. Just the same as me and the dog… sticking your neck out is dangerous, because nobody is worth it… I believe that…… I believe you…. but you don’t…… you want to… but you don’t……”

For just a second, I saw a different side of that purple.

“If you really believed that,” I said. “I would have had my brain leaking onto my shoulders five minutes ago.”

Roman shakily let go of her.

“Yes… I’m asking you,” I said. “You can still prove me wrong……. I want you to.”

——————

She slowly inched forward. I heard the click in her hand. I stared deep into her eyes. She brought it up, but wasn’t standing close enough for it to touch me.

Wasn’t standing close enough to obstruct our eye contact.

She never shook, never had the body language of even a morsel of self-doubt, but I could see it, because I was drowning in it. In her fiery eyes, always drowning.

An oily pink fire in the middle of the ocean.

——————

The room shook as the door opened. For a couple moments, only Roman looked towards it, as the two of us stayed locked. I broke contact first as I looked towards the doorway. Elijah was standing in it.

“Seems like as good a time as any,” He said.

She finally looked over to him.

“Get out. Now. Don’t even start talking,” She commanded.

He opened his mouth, but then looked up as if considering what he could’ve properly said in response to that.

“Elijah, I’m serious, leave!” She said,

He looked back down and sighed, as he stepped inside and leaned against the opposite wall, looking at us. I looked over to Roman to see his confusion, just long enough to look back and see Elizabeth standing in the doorway.

——————

I felt the air switch in the room. I don’t know if it was quick enough for Lizzie to not see, but The Girl dashed behind me, hiding the gun behind my back. She pressed it low to my spine as she spoke.

“Elijah, what are you doing?” The Girl said. “Get her the hell out of here,”

“….. can I talk?” He replied.

“I don’t want you to, I want you to take her and leave-what is going on?” She said,

Elijah’s eyes squinted with confusion as he whispered to himself.

“You can’t talk, but ‘what is going o-‘“ He murmured and groaned.

He looked down at her.

“Do you want to leave?” Elijah asked Lizzie.

Lizzie looked up at him and shook her head. I couldn’t read her expression. She was wearing different clothes, not covered in blood. Standing. Awake. Alive.

Elijah looked back to us.

“Elizabeth told Amelia that she wanted to talk to him,” He said to The Girl, motioning to me. “Amelia, and I, of course told her that you wouldn’t like that, and Lizzie told me that she is absolutely fine with running away again the second that nobody is looking.”

He looked up at the ceiling, but spoke to Lizzie.

“What was it you said? If you did it once, you can do it again? That sound about right?” He said.

I heard a small noise deep in The Girl’s throat from behind me.

“So, you know… I personally am not trying to poke the bear of how much of a bluff that is,” Elijah continued to us. “I regretted this long before stepping into the room, so I know we’ll probably be having WORDS afterwards, but… it felt unsafe to ignore.”

——————

“It’s okay, Lizzie,” Roman said.

I heard The Girl’s neck crane behind me. I couldn’t even imagine the look on her face. Roman shot The Girl an eyebrow, silently laying down suppressive fire to her anger.

“I’ll only…” Lizzie began as all four of us looked back to her. “I’ll only be a minute.”

She sounded just as diminished as she had in the hole, even without hiding her voice like she had back then.

“I remembered that you weren’t supposed to be let in… and that they would probably throw you right back out,” She said to me. “I wanted to make sure you were okay before that... I’m surprised you’re even still here.”

I didn’t know if I was allowed to respond. I didn’t totally care if I was or not, but I would’ve preferred if my brains were not blown out in front of Lizzie. I didn’t really think The Girl would have the balls to do that, but I didn’t want to risk being wrong there. Elijah spoke up for me as he looked to The Girl.

“I’m sure your business isn’t finished here, but can he get a verbal recess for a little?” Elijah said to her.

I wasn’t a fan of his word choice. I could hear her heel tapping behind me. Her knee was brushing my back. Her left hand appeared on my cheek, blocking my ear from Lizzie’s view as she leaned into it.

“I want this conversation over in 300 seconds,” She whispered. “Starting now… derail it and I’ll show her how ‘okay’ you’re going to be.”

Fucking “300 seconds”, shut up.

I cleared my spike-strip of a throat.

“Dude,” I began to Lizzie. “I’m surprised I’m still here too. Turns out they can’t get enough of me.”

Roman ticked. Lizzie let a gentle smile come on.

“Yeah,” I continued. “I’m just about okay.”

“You… don’t really sound like it,” She said as she tilted her head.

“Well, I just got my tonsils removed, so I’m not really supposed to be talking for a while.”

She switched her smile off.

“Can you… not tell jokes right now?” She said,

I looked to Roman, who was expressing the perfect facial personification of “That’s what I’m saying…”

“Uh, sorry,” I said, turning back to her. “I was trying to cut some tension in here before half-time…”

“Dude,” She groaned.

I listened.

“………. I’m glad you’re okay too,” I said.

“I’m not.”

Okay, Existential Dread II: This Time It’s-

“Yeah…. I kinda got that by now.”

She fidgeted, looking at the ground. She definitely didn’t know I was on a 300 second timer. She could’ve known that I was on a FIVE MINUTE TIMER, but she didn’t.

“Elizabeth, I would really like it if you didn’t run away again.”

She looked back up.

“To be honest, I would be pretty pissed to know you did that after my unbelievable effort to undo your previous getaway,” I said.

“…. didn’t I tell you not to call me that?” She said,

Didn’t you just let Elijah say it?

“Lizzie, what’s going on?”

——————

Alright come on, come on quicker answering please!

——————

“It just… doesn’t feel right,” She said,

“What doesn’t?”

“… being okay, I guess.”

I sighed.

“Didn’t we talk about this?”

“Is that supposed to just make me okay with it?”

No, and I can’t act like it is.

“I feel…” She started. “I feel worse than before. Before, I had thought I was only being dramatic, and just let myself be that way because I felt like it. Now… I agree with myself from before……. I don’t feel like I should… I don’t know…”

“Still be alive?”

Roman and Elijah both looked at me with somewhat angered disbelief.

“Not as the same brain I was… no. It feels like I should have… restarted somewhere else or something,” She said.

Elizabeth had felt It too. That feeling of anticlimax I had felt when being saved… it wasn’t exclusive to my sci-fi search and rescue. I had thought that a self-pitying discomfort was fairly earned when I had felt it, so I was also convinced that it must’ve been a unique emotion. Now though, I imagined Lizzie waking up in disarray days later. Maybe with Robert crying beside her, maybe an annoyingly medium crowd of people around her bed while she stared up at the ceiling. The same way I had stared up at the “sky” that night.

“That’s a pretty shit feeling, huh?”

She frowned.

“It’s not a feeling… it’s like… a really big want.”

“That’s a feeling still.”

“….. how would you know?”

I felt ready.

——————

“You know, Lizzie… I hate to get preachy with you, especially when we’ve already covered this ground and… I really am so incredibly tired of speaking,” I began. “I was thinking about what you said down there. About prolonging the inevitable……. and I feel like you’re probably okay to say this to…… I’ve never really been able to convince myself that life has a meaning. That’s not like a… pessimistic campaign, it’s just my mental example. It doesn’t make me sad or anything because… I just think it makes too much sense to be depressing. If I wanted to say it in a depressing way, I could tell you something like ‘existence is constantly killing itself’, or, ‘No one is supposed to be here, nothing is supposed to be here. There’s not even supposed to be a universe here’-etcetera yada. Um… a better way would be… it’s just a weird accident that keeps making smaller weird accidents. Sometimes a weird accident takes a couple days to kill, sometimes it takes like… seventy to a hundred years…… I don’t know how well you remember the world before you got trapped in here, but back there, it’s a constant display of life being something’s lingering mistake. Everyone is just alive like it means nothing. Everyday, all the time. People die everyday too, but that doesn’t mean that everyone dies. Until the world ends or something ridiculously cataclysmic like that, everyone will NEVER die. Everyone just keeps living more and more, and there’s more and more ‘Everyone’ doing it every day. Really… no one ever dies until it happens right next to you. Normal life is always ‘safe’, even though it keeps eventually killing us….. do I have to keep explaining like an asshole, or do you see where I’m going with this?”

She stared at me.

“Of course I don’t. You talk… really weird. Is that on purpose?”

Most of the time, I just forget that I’m not talking to myself.

“Also, I don’t think that’s the same,” She said. “This place is way more dangerous than the real world.”

“Yeah, duh. And yet you’ve still survived here for longer than the lifespan of most things in the entirety of time and space survive, period.”

She looked a little angry.

“That’s… exaggerating.”

“Bzzzz, wrong. You know that three days is a comically long life for a mayfly? There’s like one hundred thousand million billion of those things constantly living. You know how much minuscule little tardigrade bacteria is alive in space for such a stupid little time that it might as well have never existed? You know how many humans die before they’re even big enough to be called a fetus?”

She didn’t answer.

“Life is stupid. It’s dumb. It’s such a dumb perfect storm of stupid coincidence, it’s an actual joke that it constantly keeps happening….. it always ends though. You’re going to die, Lizzie, but I shouldn’t have to tell you that you still would have died if you had never ended up here…. that doesn’t mean that being alive is arrogant.”

She rubbed between her eyes.

“That doesn’t mean that you’re childish, or obnoxious, or stubborn for not letting an IKEA be the death of you.”

——————

“That… doesn’t make me feel any better.”

300 seconds had come and passed.

“I would be extremely surprised if it did. The thing is, there’s people that care about you here. I get that you understand the concept of death, and… sort of the concept of Hell……. But I don’t think you understand the concept of your life meaning something to someone. That’s something that a lot of people in the real world never experience….. you have that here.”

I felt like I was just talking to hear the sound of my own voice, as I heard an anger building in my tone. I had no idea if I was getting through to her.

“…… do you… think that that’s sad?” She said

“What?” I said, annoyed.

“….. someone having nobody who cares about them. Do you think that’s more sad than life not meaning anything? Why should I have to care about somebody caring about me if nothing means anything?”

Because nobody loves unless they’re sick…

Goddammit, leave.

I needed to rationally think about what I was saying to her.

“I think it’s a little sad… and I can’t properly tell you how sad it actually is since… it’s just an undeniable fact that I, at some point or another, had people in the world who cared about me. Even with that being true, I still found a way to be so-…… yeah, I think it’s definitely sad. You don’t have to care about anything if you don’t want to, but when I say that life has no meaning…. I don’t think that means the same thing as ‘nothing means anything’. I definitely don’t think it means that your feelings are meaningless. Same as all the people around you. So… if you act in a way that’s totally ignorant to how it will emotionally affect them, I don’t think that life having no meaning erases the fact of that being a serious dick move.”

She was tearing up. It was too late to be scared of hurting her, and she seemed all too eager for something to be the nail in her emotional coffin.

——————

“I don’t think you’re a bad person for running away, Lizzie. I’ve spent my whole life doing it…. that’s a perspective I can properly speak from….. I think I’m educated on it enough to tell you…. it never works. Moving on from something is healthy… running away from something is not. It’s…. just important to know the difference.”

She stared at me silently for almost a whole minute as nobody spoke.

——————

She giggled genuinely, wiping ghost tears from the corners of her eyes.

“heheh.. I… don’t get it at all. I have no idea what you even just said….. maybe I haven’t grown up enough to know what it means.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Yeah… I don’t know if you can tell by the situation I’m in but… I really haven’t either.”

Her smile shrunk, but didn’t exactly leave.

“It’s not that I don’t care about anyone…”

“Yeah, I never say you didn’t-“

“-No, I know, it’s just… care is weird here… a lot of feelings are weird here. Not hard to feel, just weird.”

Lizzie was likely a lot more intelligent than the person she was currently having a conversation with.

“So, I’m… I’m not gonna be always happy just because of something you say,” She said. “I’m still really scared of myself doing something….. I just wanted to tell you.”

I would be borderline concerned if I had made any significant difference there. I just hope she figures it out on her own.

“I don’t think anybody expects you to be permanently happy……. and…. fear is okay… it’s a really useful tool sometimes, ya know?”

“… no. But if you say so...”

Well, yeah. I wouldn’t expect the little girl that traversed this hellscape out of spite to understand conventional fear.

She looked away from me, and this time, began to turn around. The pressure in the room was a couple footsteps away from breaking. She stopped a moment before taking her first one, and turned back to me.

“……. I don’t even know what your name is.”

I felt the gun press further into my back. I didn’t care.

“It’s Cody.”

She nodded silently and turned around, exiting my view out of the doorway. I had no ability to tell if I was proud of that interaction, but I was no longer afraid that “saving” Lizzie had been a mistake.

Elijah looked at me with a playful smirk as he walked towards the doorway to follow her.

“How come you told her your name the first time-“

“-Elijah-get the fuck out of here,” The Girl spat behind me.

He retained his smile as he exited the same as Lizzie, closing the door behind him.

Immediately after it shut, the gun disappeared from my back. I heard the safety click off, then heard the gun slip back into her belt as she returned to my front. She grabbed my throat in one hand and my hair in the other.

I kinda feel like she knew what she was doing there.

She fumed in my face until I decided I was feeling comedically revitalized.

“What? You thinking about which way you wanna knock me out this time?” I teased. “I think an elbow drop would be classy.”

She studied me for a little while longer before speaking.

“That Lizzie? You expect me to believe that that Lizzie turned someone into a stain?”

“I’m not expecting shit from you…… ‘you don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to’.”

She balled up her face in disgust.

“What? You didn’t like my speech? I thought it was pretty motivational. Maybe she’ll only harshly cripple people from now on.”

“You just told her that she’s going to die-“

“-She thought she already did, you imbecile.”

——————

She let go of me and walked towards the door. Roman’s eyes widened.

“Um, where are you going?” He asked sharply.

“We’re going to talk to Elijah,” She replied to him. “Get out.”

She opened the door and motioned from him to the open passage.

“What?” He said. “He’s just done? What happened to-”

“-you wanna stay and play cards with him or something? He’s not even close to done, but being in this room is a joke. I need a professional setting.”

Roman took an awkward step and then looked over to me.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care I don’t care. Whatever you’re about to say, I don’t care. Let her keep saying whatever she wants, just leave.”

The Girl walked back over to me.

“You don’t tell him what to do-“

“-I KNOW!” I let myself scream. “YOU FUCKING DO! EVERYBODY KNOWS!”

She glared at me. Original.

“You know how fun you would be to torture?” She said,

Um, maybe she knew what she was doing there?

“That seems like a really lazy threat from you. Are you just leaving to go refill on material?”

She smiled sarcastically.

“Nope, you did it! I’m exhausted,” She said. “The next time I see you, I’m sure it will be a much more civil conversation.”

I squirmed a little as the “I don’t care” wolf began fighting with the “what does that mean” one.

“Can’t wait,” I finally said. “Maybe you’ll have your shit together enough to not let a sensitive ass bluff like that slip out of your cunt-mouth again.”

She instantly punched the astronomical shit out of me as I felt a hollow wrench in my gum.

I had laughed for a moment out of shock, but felt my tongue around my mouth. I found a gap where one of my right premolars used to be. I looked left to the ground and saw the bloody chunk of enamel there.

As far as my foot was in the grave, I still couldn’t really laugh at that.

I looked back up to her to see her rubbing her left fist, slightly wincing. She met eyes with me.

“I’ll have someone throw that out later, you can sit with it for a while. Give yourself a monologue about how to speak with some fucking decency.”

I didn’t feel clever enough to get the last word in as she turned around and began walking away. She turned to Roman on her way out without stopping.

“I will lock this door and leave whether you follow me or not,” She said.

She exited and stood by the door as Roman submitted to being The Golden Boy. He followed her trail silently to the door without giving me a second glance, and exited out of my view. The Girl shot me one last sickening smile and slammed the door to the room. A giant bang followed a second after, and I was met with silence and solitude.

My mouth was now bleeding out onto my chin. I turned and stared at my tooth on the floor. It was small, but I couldn’t heal that back to normal. That was a piece of my body on the ground that I could never reattach.

It made me… so incredibly sad.

I debated letting some anger surge through me, but instead realized I had just been given the gift I was previously wishing for.

I sucked up as much blood as I could, swallowing it to help lubricate my swollen throat, and rested my head back down on the table. It had taken a lot of trouble, but I finally had earned my nap. My thoughts of the past ten minutes trailed-off effortlessly to nothing as I drifted underwater.

——————

I heard the door open. I’m not sure how long I had been asleep for, but it was good to me. No pain reduction of course, but my brain swam warm and pruned in a pleasured satisfaction.

I didn’t speak or move as the door seemed to softly close. I didn’t even know that was possible. At this point, I was amused by their persistence, but not enough to continue playing the mouse. I wanted to fall back asleep in ignorance. Against my better judgment though, I opened my eyes.

The room seemed dark, so it must have been after 9:00 PM. A small orange flicker was dancing around the wall. I heard two gentle clanks as I quickly closed my eyes. Two separate items were set onto the table. After some shuffling and an extended silence, I peeked again. The glow on the wall had adopted the shadow of what I assumed was my head. I stayed silent, waiting to be bathed in some kind of annoyance.

Nothing came.

——————

I wanted another forty winks, but I was sort of expecting someone to wake me up, so I had slowly drifted back to anxious lucidity. Also, though I’m sure it would have been so yellow it was orange, I had to piss.

I slowly raised my head to see which episode of Seinfeld I was currently sitting in.

Elijah and his partner were sitting down against the opposite wall. Even knowing that someone would be in the room, I kind of jumped in my skin seeing the two. They didn’t notice me, as they were both huddled together, with a book that Elijah held in his hands. She held a small pen-flashlight to the pages, curled into his side as they both silently read.

It was… you know what it was, I’m not writing the word.

On the table, a plate of food had been placed on the left corner, with an aromatherapy candle on the right corner. Lilac, I think. I watched the flame dance gently for a moment.

“Is there some symbolism in the etch-a-sketch, or is it her selective autism?” Elijah whispered as I looked over.

She gently swatted his arm.

“Stop, it’s like her coping mechanism for…” She began before looking over to me and freezing.

Elijah followed her fear over to my side of the room.

“Holy shit, you look creepy as hell!” He said to me, smiling. “How long you been watchin’ us for?”

I wanted to ask him why he was here at night, but I refused to speak. His partner began to stand as she placed the pen in her pocket. I expected her to go immediately for the door, but instead, she walked up to the plate of food and pushed it closer to me.

“Elijah said I can’t give you a fork so…”

The meal consisted of two square waffles, topped with broccoli, mashed potatoes, and… I think they were fish-balls?

I noticed that Elijah’s partner was fairly short, maybe 5’2” at the tallest. He stood up behind her, closing the book and placing it down. He picked up a water bottle that had been sitting beside him and joined us at the table. He placed it down and put his hand on the girl’s hip.

“I’m not gonna intimately quench your thirst like Roman, I heard that was awkward as fuck,” He said. “Buuut, I got permission to untie one of your hands again……. from myself, so… don’t tell anyone.”

I stared at the two of them. I wasn’t going to waste my own time with the emotion that I so desperately wanted to feel. I can’t do this. I won’t do this. I pushed the plate out of my way with my forehead, and placed my head face down back on the table.

I heard Elijah blow a raspberry as the girl giggled.

“Alright, well,” Elijah began. “We’re gonna stay if you don’t mind. It’s always kind of warm in here for some reason. It’s like a cozy little reading nook.”

“That’s because your hot ass breath is always flooding the room,” She said to him.

I could hear the smile plastered to her voice. What?

“Probably but..” He began. “I can’t really smell anything after that infec-… sorry, cold you gave me…. never going raw on a first date again-“

“-fuuuucking ew dude,” She laughed through saying.

I heard them walking back to the wall and crouching down to the floor to adjust themselves.

Ever been trying to stay mad at the person, but they start trying to make you laugh? It’s bittersweet, but it just makes you want to be more mad. This was all bitter, no sweet. I had felt the sides of my lips getting tugged on against my will, and almost let myself scream. They’re being funny? Right now?! Yeah! Of course! Because everything is a joke, but only when it’s at my expense. When I want to be funny, everyone is confused about why I can’t take this seriously. Go to Hell. The reasons for me being mad at Elijah seemed to be multiplying like rabbits the more that I thought about it. Wasn’t he supposed to be the one that was my friend? Why did he keep making me so angry?

I… guess it was bittersweet.

I lifted my head up again to see that they were both just staring at me silently, waiting for me to do what I just did.

“Yeah, I’m the creepy one…” I said through the sandpaper.

Elijah smiled and hopped up like the clowny bastard I was beginning to suspect he was. He walked around to my back.

“Voice like an angel,” He said.

As I felt his hands on my left wrist, I was sad to observe that the plate seemed to be plastic, not ceramic. A millisecond long fantasy had taken place where my hand came free to immediately smash it and slice his throat with a shard. Instead, my hand came free, and I just let it hang sadly. He reappeared to my left. Restraint consoled me, as I felt that the novelty of spitting in people’s faces had become a bad look on me, even in the socially impudent state I had fallen into here.

“I told Margo about your Lizzie speech,” He said. “She said she would have been groaning up a storm if she was there with us…… Oh! By the way!”

He ran back over to his partner and threw a pair of jazz-hands down to her on the floor.

“This is Margo! I know you guys have met like two and a half times now, but you’ve never hung out.”

I would have settled for slicing my own throat. I probably wouldn’t have felt a difference.

Margo gave me a weak, sympathetic smile, seeming to know that I wasn’t very eager to “hang” with either of them.

“I wouldn’t have actually groaned,” She said. “Probably woulda just gotten second-hand embarrassment and politely excused myself. Public speaking is hard enough without hecklers.”

I looked between the two of them, horrifically antagonized, then silently took the water bottle from the table. I placed it on my leg and tried to remove the cap with just one hand. It quickly slipped and landed on the floor as I closed my eyes in frustration. I opened them again to already see Elijah standing in front of me with the bottle in his hand, opened.

Shitty excuse for an olive branch.

I snatched it, looking away from him as soon as I could. I slowly sipped the water bottle as he walked back over to Margo. It went down a lot easier than it had before, but it still felt like the worst case of strep in recorded human history.

I finished and set the empty bottle down. Elijah sat down, but the two stayed separated. If it was for my sake, it wasn’t making any difference. Margo and Elijah together in a room was something I could immediately understand to be my present enemy. The last thing I needed from this community was a wholesome dynamic. I’m tired of being attached.

I pulled the plate back in front of me. I was so in love with my resistance to opposition, yet turned into a beady-eyed little rodent whenever offered sustenance.

“You feel okay?” Elijah asked me.

I began chewing a waffle. The sudden whimper that involuntarily shivered out from me was probably a sufficient answer for him.

“I tried to give you the softest food we have right now…” Margo said.

“Shouldn’t you guys own a Nutribullet or something?”

“Sure! But, it’s 2 O’clock in the morning,” Elijah said. “Excessive noise after dark is collectively agreed to be not cricket.”

“What the hell?” Margo mumbled to herself, giving Elijah a weird side-eye.

“What’s it matter?” I said. “Thought it was safe here. Because of the walls…”

“It’s for us, not Staff,” Margo said. “It’s hard enough for people to sleep without random external noises to keep freaking them the fuck out.”

“You don’t need to tell him that,” Elijah said slyly. “Cody already knows about our ability to sleep at night.”

Strike one of one. Consider me out of the conversation.

“That was a joke by the way, Cody,” Elijah said.

“Everything you say is. I’m trying to eat.”

He bypassed that.

“Are you trying to ignore me because your throat is made of sawblades, or are you interested in pouting for a little longer?” He said.

I finished swallowing my first and last fish-ball (what a crime).

“I was expecting to see Her again.”

“Margo?”

“Who do you think he’s talking about, Elijah?”

“Ohhhh, Her Her. Right,” Elijah said. “Well… you two are gonna have a little break from each other. But you’ll see her overmorrow.”

“I’ll… what?”

“You’ll see her ove-“

“-Can you stop saying words you learned a day ago?” Margo snapped at him before looking to me. “You’ll see her the day after tomorrow.”

“The day… after tomorrow?”

“Okay,” She said to Elijah whilst staring right at me. “Try not to use big words with him-“

“-no, I just-…. shut up,” I said.

She smiled wide.

“Why am I seeing her the day after tomorrow?” I asked. “I don’t want to see her at all.”

White lie.

“Why am I staying that long?” I said.

“Well,” Elijah began. “Because we’re hoping you could stay…. a lot longer.”

Is there a gas-leak in this room?

“Like this? Why would I ever-… who’s we?”

Elijah paused for a second, sort of looking in Margo’s direction, but not directly at her. She had closed her eyes, and rested her head against the wall like she had a sudden headache.

“The Omen,” He said.

I heard Margo groaning as she opened her eyes.

“The Council,” She said to me. “The Council wants you to stay. Please pretend you didn’t hear Elijah speak just now-“

“Would you stop squandering me-I barely ever get to say it-“

“-You should never ‘get’ to say it-it’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever heard-“

“-That can’t be true, you work with Nikko-“

“-Hello!?” I said as they halted and turned. “The Council, is that who voted on me leaving last time?”

“Yep, that’s the one!” Elijah said. “It’s our mockery mechanism of government.”

“Democracy, obviously,” Margo said.

“Why would that be obvious?”

“I don’t know,” She said. “What else do you think it would be? Federalism?”

“After what I saw last night? Seems like you guys are stuck in a pretty permanent stage of anarchism.”

“Last night?” Elijah said. “That’s cute, try last last night”

Ugh.

Cody Camargo: Twenty-two days in.

“You have a fake codename for your homegrown democratic government?” I asked him. “Is it a group of people or a fucking mythical oracle?”

He squirmed a little, embarrassed.

“Am I not allowed to have fun? Why is my entertainment being demarcated?”

“Dude, stop,” Margo chimed.

“Whatever,” I said, going back to picking at my plate. “I’m not staying. I don’t need to wait overmorrow for that.”

“It’s a… date, not a… unit of measurement,” Elijah muttered.

I put down my scoop of mashed potatoes on my waffle corner fork.

“What would happen to you if you let me leave right now? Public execution?”

“That wouldn’t be a very left-leaning punishment,” Margo said.

“Yeah? So what does happen then? A stern talking to from the result of a much too serious bring your daughter to work day at the police headquarters?

“He’s pretty good,” Margo whispered to Elijah, smiling.

He ignored her.

“Cody, you’re not leaving. We have to put you through due process. This isn’t like the last time, I promise.”

“I don’t know, my body is telling me that it’s pretty similar so far. You wanna tell me how this is different?”

“Because this time, it’s your choice.”

“Sounds like a total lie, but I’ll play along. I choose to leave. Now. Right now please. Not over-tomorrow, now.”

“That’s not how it works. You have to come before The Council.”

“Gross,” Margo interjected before Elijah shot her an irritated glance.

She made an “oh shit” face, and quickly turned away, exiting the discussion.

“We need you to advocate for why it’s rational to make you a cog in this society,” Elijah said, looking back to me.

“Sure, sure. Wanna hear my rehearsal speech? ‘It’s not! Bye! I’ll start pissing my pants if you don’t escort me off the premises’.”

He stonewalled.

“Do you choose to be a coward because you’re too illiterate to properly express your feelings?” He said coldly.

I truly hadn’t been angry this entire time. I was annoyed for sure, but I felt like anger was becoming so stale of an emotion that it was hard to come by naturally. That is to say, that even after that statement, I still wasn’t entirely irate. I was more blown away by the sudden audacity that had seemed to come out of nowhere.

“Is this the real you? Is the nice, funny guy-thing an act for the sake of your own boredom?”

“Why are you trying to sabotage yourself? We’re offering you a chance to stay-“

“-You’re offering yourselves an opportunity to laugh at me begging.”

“No, Cody. That’s not what this is. We want you here, but we need you to want it too-“

“-‘want you here’-you have got a FUNNY way of showing it-“

“-that isn’t us. Everything you’ve seen isn’t us, and this is just as much an apology as it is an opportunity for you to know what we are-“

“-I don’t want an apology-“

“-WELL THEN WHAT DO YOU WANT-“

“-I WANTED YOU TO FUCKING LEAVE ME OUTSIDE!”

Elijah went silent. A look of dread had worked its way onto Margo’s face as she looked back and forth between us.

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t about to keep screaming. It wasn’t about the pain anymore, I didn’t want to let him be the reason for my emotions.

“I tried to convince myself that this is possible. I only had doubts because of how terrifying the idea of giving up was. I didn’t have a very long period of normalcy after I had first started trying to feel better, so maybe I just didn’t get the chance to try hard enough, but it really didn’t take much to knock some sense into me. This is a lost cause, and I don’t feel like running for my life on a treadmill.”

He stared at me blankly.

“I’m done, Elijah. I don’t want this.”

——————

Elijah stood up, with Margo quickly following. I think she had been preparing to hold him back.

“I’ll um…” He began calmly. “I’ll let you sleep on it.”

She noticeably distressed, taking the cue to open the door beside them. She walked to the doorway with the book, as he walked behind me. He re-tied my limb, and took the plate, bottle and candle from the table. He stared down at me.

“I’m never bored,” He said. “Just to let you know.”

Pompous fucker.

He turned and walked over, joining Margo at the door as she took the plate from him. He had just exited when my body cried out to me.

“Wait!” I called.

They both stopped and leaned their heads back in towards me. It felt so pathetic to say this after that argument.

“I… have to pee.”

Margo cringed.

“Oh, right. Um….” Elijah started.

He looked down at the empty bottle in his hand.

“Okay. I’ll see you later,” Margo said to him as she swiftly exited.

He looked back to me.

“You wouldn’t happen to remember where I put the cap for this, would you?”

——————

Sometime during my sleep, I just barely felt my head being lifted, and released onto a pillow between me and the table.

“Asshole,” Elijah’s voice whispered.

——————

Cody Camargo: Twenty-three days in.

I woke up softly to nothing. No door slamming closed or ripping open, no screaming dictator, no stomping footsteps from the floor above, just natural emergence. The pillow felt as if it had fused with the side of my head. The rest was sore, but not screaming. Even my rib seemed to be sleeping like a baby. It would wake up crying eventually, but in my groggy state, it was calm.

——————

I slowly woke myself up out of drowsiness as I began to cough. I suddenly became scared that I was suffocating, and had tried forcing in a sharp breath that stung my throat. The sting reverberated into my lungs as I went into a hacking fit. Every impact was giving my rib the Heimlich maneuver. I sat up, trying desperately to extinguish the fire that had started in my trachea. It persisted until my saliva was hot around my tongue. I blinked my eyes rapidly to clear the water, as I saw specks of blood on the light blue pillowcase. I let my head fall back forward, feeling the circles of moisture on my cheek. I sat breathing deep, head re-glued to the pillow, scared that I would lose my ability to draw breath at any moment.

——————

The door opened.

“You still asleep?” I heard him say playfully.

I shot up to look at Elijah.

“Doyouavewater?” I said so fast that my words slurred into one.

“Jesus, yeah I… I have some,” He said, holding a bottle of water up in his hand. “Let me just untie-“

“-Jusgetafuckoverereangivitome.”

He was about to retort, but looked down at the pillow, seeing the stains on the case. He sighed and hurried over, unbinding my left hand and placing the bottle in it. My hand shot quickly towards my head before he grabbed my wrist and fought my still moving arm to open the bottle in my palm. The second the cap separated, I practically drenched my chin to throw the nozzle in my mouth. White knuckles bared, I probably wasted 25% of the water as it spilled down my neck and onto my shirt. I finished and gasped, now finding it even harder to inhale somehow.

“You have more?” I demanded more than asked.

“Not… with me right now-“

“-THEN CAN YOU GET SOME?! WHY AM I ONLY GETTING LIKE TEN MOUTHFULS OF WATER EVERY TWELVE HOU-KEKKEK“

I went into another self induced fit as Elijah ran out of the room. I hacked into my lap, whining between coughs in a pathetic desperation.

“E-Li-Jah..” I called through coughing. “E-LI-JAAAAHHH-“

“-I’m here, I’m here,” He said, dashing back into the cell.

He threw the pillow onto the floor with his wrist, placing two bottles down. He opened each quickly, as I went for the first before he could even get a hold on the second.

I heard him panting as I swallowed repeatedly.

“Go slow,” I heard him say.

I didn’t listen, and continued chugging.

“Hey!” He yelled.

A ball of water was caught between the rock and hard place of another harsh rasp, and I spit a ridiculous wave of water onto my lap.

“GOD DAMMIT CALM DOWN!” He ran around the table and took the water from my hand. “YOU’RE WASTING IT!”

I was in too much pain to pay attention to the vitriol in his voice, the same as I had only heard that night with him and Sean arguing.

I was now choking on my own lungs, as well as the burning water flooding down the wrong pipe. I coughed and coughed as he remained silent in front of me. Hacking and hacking and hacking and hacking until the cough was so dry that it felt like I was having the moisture halved in my body with every repeated blast. I went on like a gashed record.

——————

I calmed down and looked up what had to be six minutes later, only to see that Elijah was not even in the room with me anymore. The door was hanging wide open with my limb still unbound. I looked down to my other limbs. I reached down to my left leg, secured at the ankle, and began to try working my fingers into the writhing of the ropes. I realized how dry my burning, cracking skin was. Ignorantly wrapped around the shattered body of insides that was so greatly demanding more of my attention, I hadn’t noticed the sensation of its prickly thirst. Only now could I feel the itchy necrosis on the top of my hand. I felt like I had become instantaneously cognizant of a horrible allergic reaction that was spreading over both of my arms. The recognition of this began incinerating my right wrist, still swaddled in abrasive ropes.

Was it an allergic reaction? Is that what this haunting in my lungs was? No, I wasn’t even allergic to anything, and that cough was not the same.

I was so overwhelmed. I could barely force a passion into the muscle of my fingers. Liberating myself was far too lofty an ambition for my current state. I held the rope in my fingers, hopelessly begging for it to magically fall untied from me.

“You’re not doing what I think you are..”

I looked up to see Elijah standing in the doorway again.

“Are you?”

I felt a sudden shame. I knew that I had begun painting myself as a radically nonconformist prisoner this time around, but if I had been able to untie myself, that would have shattered every ounce of understanding that Elijah and I had ever created. Even after convincing myself that I didn’t care about that, I still sank so vile as he stared at me.

“Alright,” A female voice said before I could manage to speak.

She appeared in the doorway behind Elijah, as he stepped aside without breaking eye contact from me. I wanted to maintain it, but looked over to the woman as she hurried over. It was an Indian woman, only a half a foot or so shorter than Elijah, with long, braided, brown hair down to her waist.

“This is Sandra,” He said blankly.

She put down an open pill bottle, opening the second water.

“I need you to take these,” She said.

She dipped the pill bottle into her hand, and dropped two capsules into her palm.

“Give me your hand.”

“What… what are those?” I mumbled.

She reached across the table and grabbed my arm, shoving the pills into my palm.

“Take. Them.”

I stared at her for a moment. She had a stethoscope around her neck, but it looked like it was made of plastic tubing, and the bell was far too small. (She was dressed normally besides from that, don’t imagine her wearing a lab coat)

I popped one pill into my mouth and set the other down, grabbing for the water before she caught my wrist.

“Both!” She said,

“Wait, I… I’m bad at swallowing pills, I need to do it one by one…”

She took her hand back, placing her arms sternly at her side. I took the bottle and began to swig. The pill was just big enough for me to fail my first attempt at swallowing, going for more water. I wasn’t even sure the opening to my throat was big enough for it at the moment. I finally got it down, feeling a fair amount of pressure with her standing there. I popped the second, and was able to get it down a little easier. I then SLOWLY finished the entirety of the second water bottle. I placed it down, looking up to see the woman gone, and Elijah closer to the table.

“How do you guys keep disappe-Woah!“

I felt the back of my shirt lift, as a cold hand was placed around my spine.

“What the hell?!” I exclaimed.

I felt a circle of rubber the size of a bottle-cap being placed under my shoulder blade.

“Breathe as slowly and deeply as you can for me,” Sandra said behind me. “Even if you think it will make you cough, go as far as possible.”

I looked to Elijah.

“I’m not gonna have to take my pants off, right?”

“Shut up and do it,” He said, unamused.

See what I’m saying?

I began inhaling slowly for as long as I could, to realize that it was not very long at all.

“You do know how this works, right?” She said sarcastically. “You breathe out after.”

I exhaled too quickly, as I huffed in response to that statement. I breathed in and out slowly about seven times before she stepped away and put my shirt back down.

“How much thought do I have to put into this?” The woman said to Elijah.

“Um,” He began. “Probably not the best idea to ask you-know-who that question, but I would prefer as much as you can… appreciate as much as you can.”

“Is he going to be eating soon?”

“Uhhhh… I-“

“-If I’m giving you all my thought, the answer should be ‘yes’.”

He looked down at me awkwardly. Why the hell was he struggling to answer?

“Yyyyes, he’ll eat now.”

“Good,” She said, moving around the table and taking the pill bottle. “Again at about 8:00 PM.”

She handed Elijah the bottle, taking the cap from her pocket and securing it closed in his hand. She briskly skirted past him and out the door l while he squinted at the label.

“You hungry?” He asked, with no enthusiasm in his voice.

“…yeah.”

——————

I had a salmon wrap with corn for what I think was lunch.

Elijah didn’t read. He hung in the doorway with the door ajar until I was finished. He turned to see the plate as close to empty as it was going to get. Along with my health and stamina bar, I now had a throat-pain meter to manage. Swallowing was my legendary enemy.

“You’re not gonna eat that?” He said, walking over to me.

“I’m good, can I pee though?”

He grabbed the unfinished bite off the plate and ate it as he shot me an eyebrow.

“You getting a little comfortable lately?” He garbled through chewing with his mouth open.

Wholeheartedly a serious question, or teasing me? I’d say it’s up to ANYONE’S GUESS!

“Are you mad at me or something?” I said impatiently.

He swallowed.

“Would it matter to you?”

Oh. My. Fucking. God.

“Can I piss in a dresser-drawer please?”

He rolled his eyes and turned around walking towards the door. He stopped.

“Oh crap, I forgot to tie your arm up…”

I glared at the back of his head.

“Eh,” He said. “Should be fine.”

——————

I zipped up my pants.

“I’m not mad,” Elijah said.

“Are you gonna say the word ‘disappointed’ in the next thirty seconds?”

“I was just in a bad mood about something else. I’m even surprised that it’s only the first time you’ve tried to do it.”

I walked back to the chair and eased myself down slowly. I went for the ropes on the floor to begin re-tying my legs.

“Stop,” Elijah said.

He put the crossbow on his back, and walked over to me without any one of my limbs tied down. He kneeled to the ground, beginning to tie my right leg. The back of his head was lying directly in front of me. He knew that.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him.

“I trust you.”

I stared at him as he went around the long way of the table, instead of just side-stepping around the back of me.

“Am I supposed to believe that?”

“Who actually cares, Cody? I believe it, is that enough for you?”

He started on my left leg.

“How exactly did I earn your trust so suddenly?”

He sighed, standing up.

“The distribution of my trust is up to me. You can kinda influence it I guess but… it’s mine to give. I didn’t say it was free.”

We stared at each other as my hands didn’t move from my lap.

“Can you please put your hands behind your back?” He said tiredly.

“You ever thought that maybe I don’t trust you?”

His face got angry.

“You know what? Go ahead! Break out! I’m not gonna stop you.”

He walked over to the drawer, leaving both of my hands free.

“You would never do it anyway,” He said.

“Ha! Who told you that little fairytale?”

He daintily picked up the container of my yellow (orange) waste.

“The same guy that told me his life was a ‘lost cause’. I didn’t think you were trying anymore. You looked like a guilty puppy when I walked in on you.”

“Okay, I’m glad you verbalized that you don’t get it so that I can explain it to you. I’m not sorry that I did that, I’m sorry that I got caught.”

He walked to the door without looking at me.

“Thanks, I get it now. Lucky for you, it will be a lot easier to not get caught when you have two hands.”

Lose lose.

“You don’t even know me you idiot. What if the blood on Lizzie was because of me?! What if I threatened her to lie about what happened?! What if I was waiting to be annexed so I could disembowel your children in their fucking sleep?!”

Elijah was allergic to entertaining my overkill.

“I don’t have children.”

“SOMEONE DOES! AND I COULD’VE DONE IT TO ANYONE! I WILL DO IT TO ANYONE!”

He turned to stare at me and the smoke coming out of my head.

“WHAT?!” I screamed.

“Sorry,” He began. “I’m just wondering how much longer I’m gonna have to let you keep yelling at me before you’re willing to see how impossible it is to please you.”

“Ho-…. Huh?!”

“Okay, guess it’s gonna be a little bit longer-“

“-What is impossible to please about me?!-”

“-Oh my lord, what isn’t?! You’re mad at us about kicking you out-you leave-you come back-you’re mad about us letting you stay-you’re mad about being fed-you’re mad about having water but not more water-you’re mad about being kept here and mad when I’m disappointed you tried to escape but then also mad when I let you try to escape-you’re mad about no one believing you but you’re mad at me about trusting you. YOU, came back here willingly with Elizabeth when you owe us nothing, but you’re mad that you’re still alive. You see what I’m dealing with here?”

“YOU, chose to deal with it. I didn’t ask for your fucking support, I didn’t ask for you to be my sponsor in my corner-I didn’t ask for you to please me. A council meet-“

“-Waitwaitwait, shut up-I’m not arguing with you while I’m holding your fucking piss.”

He walked out, and I heard him cursing around the corner as something splashed slightly onto the floor.

——————

“Jesus”, He said as he stormed back in. “There has got to be a better way to do that-

“-A council meeting, Elijah?! An honest to God council meeting?! Are you writing a fan-fiction or something-who gave you this dumbass idea?”

“It’s not my idea, so stop patting yourself on the back for dodging my altruism. We do it for everyone. We’ve never done it for someone who came back after being exiled, but you’re clearly a very special case for us.”

“‘Us’, or you?”

“Hey, remember when I said that I was giving you some time to think about it? Have you actually thought about it at all, you know, with all the free-time you’ve had just sitting here in silence? You seem pretty rooted to your opinion.”

“I am. The sudden care for my being is making me extremely uncomfortable. I’m dreading every second I have to keep stomaching the ploy of someone being on my side-“

“-See you need to get that word out of your head because nothing is a ploy. We want-“

“-See you need to get that word out of your mouth. I have enough trouble understanding why you want this. You keep saying ‘we’ as if you expect me to believe that anyone else is fighting for this-“

“-That’s because you have no perspective, and that’s not your fault. You can’t hear the voice of the community from this room, so you’re putting words in their mouth, and I’m trying to stop that shit.”

“I got more than enough ‘perspective’ the night I came back, Elijah. That fight was a perfect example of you forcing your perspective onto a group. What are you, second in command? Third, maybe fourth? High enough that you say jump and someone dies for a stranger?”

I could see him considering the logic of walking out and giving up on me. There wasn’t a morsel of “I shouldn’t have said that” in my mind. Elijah is not my friend.

“Roman and I,” He finally said.

I flinched.

“What?”

“We shouldn’t have opened the gate with you there, period….. he saw it in my eyes. It was my idea, sure… but Roman is higher up the chain than me. If anyone there had a responsibility to ignore you, it was him. There isn’t exactly a concrete chain of demand but….. he made a decision for your life. We both agreed that no matter what the rest did, we were pulling you in….. here you are.”

——————

Of course I didn’t believe him in the moment. Roman? Why?

He saw the confusion on my face.

——————

“Not the first time,” He said. “I already told you that I thought Patrick’s death was my fault. I thought that was something you were sensitive to… whatever.”

He walked over to the wall and leaned back, crossing his arms angrily. My comment had pulled a string in him. I doubt he had wanted to tell me about Roman.

“When you showed up with Elizabeth,” He began. “We shouldn’t have let anyone in that night, it didn’t matter who was out there.”

“….. why?”

“I told you before… because She, your She, is not the only person that makes a decision here. I know you think that she’s callous for being so quick to shove someone out, but there’s more to letting someone in than the danger of getting them in the gate. We have our reasons.”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“But you came back,” He said. “You came back with Elizabeth, so it was never really a question about whether we would open the gate. The question was….. how we could gracefully take her in and keep you out.”

“I said, screamed, that I was fine with that-“

“-but that takes trust to believe. Now you tell me Cody, do you think that you had earned my trust at that point? You sure as hell don’t think you have now, so what makes you think that statement meant anything to us back then?”

I remembered the way I had torn my throat out that night, and imagined it being nothing but white noise to them.

“Just shut up, dude,” I said. “You still cut it way too damn close. You could’ve just killed me yourselves if you really thought it was that much of an issue. I’m sure I know someone there who would’ve loved to. It seems obvious that it was a HUGE question whether or not opening the gate for Lizzie was worth it.”

He wrinkled his face.

“Because,” I said. “How could Robert have ever known that Elizabeth had been brought back if you let her die outside like a stranger? He would never see the body, so it would never hurt him. That’s what you really thought, right?”

He looked away.

“That’s the reason why I don’t understand you keeping me here. I don’t want to accuse anyone of lying, I just don’t get it. Because I brought back Elizabeth? You thought she was already dead, it’s not like you had a “Have you seen me” reward poster up for locating her. You had given up, she meant nothing to you.”

“I never said-“

“-The royal ‘you’. Also, yes, you basically did.”

He didn’t look back to me, but he spoke like he was standing next to my ear.

“Stop doing that stupid fucking whisper-rasp, it’s worse for your voice than talking normally. You think it makes you sound tough, it doesn’t.”

I giggled.

“I see why you two are friends,” I said. “You’re just like her when someone doesn’t listen to you.”

He looked over, a little shocked after hearing how my normal voice currently sounded. I could do it, but it sounded like I was drowning.

“Always talking like you’re in some corner that nobody put you in,” I added.

“Hm,” He said. “Maybe it’s just your voice that I’m tired of.”

I scoffed and put my head down on the table.

“Please leave and stop saying predictable shit,” I said, muffled by the steel.

I heard him meander for a moment.

“It’s 2:20 PM, Cody… you have less than twenty hours to decide.”

The door opened and closed with its usual ruckus.

It wasn’t incredibly “predictable”, but it was just as inconsequential as the better part of everything else he’d said.

——————

I’m so mad. I have less than twenty hours to decide? What am I deciding? What am I changing my mind about? I feel like investing any emotion into this is a total scam. Elijah wants me to want this, why? That’s my question above all fucking else, no matter what anybody says, and nobody has said anything.

Why?

What is the difference for them? I doubt my comedic timing is so desirable to be around that they’d go through all this trouble to fight their instincts.

No, I don’t care. That twenty-hour timer is just the distance between me and the end of this psychological-guilt-trip-labyrinth. Let the clock run down.

——————

You know what makes me even more mad? The fact that he’s so clearly electioneering with my fear of death, trying to existentially bully me into thinking I NEED this so bad.

No, it’s not that, I’m thinking about you. Thinking about your safety, because trust me, you are not safe. Everyone knows you’re not safe.

He’s such a manipulative little bastard. He must get a kick from seeing my brain wriggle back and forth in worry. Every time we have a “conversation”, he goes down this invisible checklist of which personality he thinks will exploit my weakness the best. That must be so easy to do with a prisoner.

Fucking lying little fence-sitting coward. I would hate to live with a person like you. At least everyone here who hates me seems to me honest about it.

——————

How long would I be paying it off?

Okay, I’m here, but how far to my knees would I have to drop in the presence of anyone that allowed that for the rest of my life? I’d be living like a worm. They can’t expect me to think I’d be an equal, right? Everyday would be a ceaseless cage-match of me and the judging eyes of everyone who knows that I shouldn’t be here. To be honest, I would heavily question the moral ethics of this place if that wasn’t the case.

Take Robert for example. If I was “integrated” into this society, is he just supposed to make merry with me as if we’d always been brothers in Christ, just because I happened to be the body that brought Lizzie back? Sure, it means more to him than anyone else, but is that enough? If it was my daughter, would I throw the rest of my reservation out the window and assume the best? I just don’t see anyone who lives here assuming the best of anything or anyone.

——————

It just wouldn’t last. It would most likely be my fault, but eventually I would break whatever slipshod agreement is expected of me. I can’t compose myself to that kind of conduct. I was already ready to completely let go of myself in the real world. I’ve retired. The energy it would take to keep my spine straight here is an energy I don’t have.

Once everyone sees that, then what? I’m gone again? It would probably be a month at the most, but that month of living in ignorance would destroy me. I would crumple the second they shoved me back out of the gate.

And would that month even be blissful ignorance? I would probably be so constantly worked up with all the eyes on my back, that the day I’m thrown out might be a relief. The day I don’t have to worry about being judged anymore. The Staff don’t judge. As long as you’re not one of them, they’d treat you with the same respect level as anyone.

——————

Remember the “living” thing?

——————

I wouldn’t kill myself. I can’t act like I would. If I died at the hands of something else, I might be slightly grateful no matter what happens, but I could never end it myself. I would have to just wait for something to end me. It would be easy to influence how fast it happens, but I wouldn’t be fighting that battle.

——————

My rib is sore. Only sore, nothing else. My gum has been bleeding slightly, but now it’s mostly just a weird bubble that I can’t resist prodding with my tongue. Something is very wrong in the places I can’t see, but it’s receded to a post-traumatic headache and a sore throat. The rest is just crinkling and atrophied.

It’s been years since I’d felt like my body and I understood each other, but I thought we had at least agreed on giving up in here. It’s persisting so angrily. Maybe to spite me, but I call it unrelated.

I’m supposed to be listening to it.

——————

I remember the moment I woke up on my first cataloged day here. My thought pattern kept returning to inaccessible things, like it couldn’t yet recognize the fact that we were somewhere else.

Even after I got up and started walking, I was constantly reminding myself to move my favorite plant from the living room into my bedroom, because Chandler and Toby never watered any of them. I’d felt physically fantastic that morning, and mentally willing. That’s the only reason I was able to continue searching for those next few days, and didn’t immediately slip off the edge of sanity. I had woken up feeling so randomly sanguine. Christ, I was calm.

I’ve been thinking about that morning a lot. If I had never gone to buy that table, I would have spent that morning waking up in my normal bedroom. Would I have had that same optimism? What if I had woken up that day and realized how stupid it was that I was planning to spend the rest of my life practically dead? If I had felt that same way without the impossible obstacle of incomprehensible abduction… it would have felt so easy.

So easy to say: “But… you’re still alive… what more is there to talk about? Just make it better.”

By the time I felt that, the place for it was far away. If I could have stepped back, even if it didn’t feel right in the moment…

——————

What the hell do I know?

Do I really think I would have been intelligent enough to see it?

See it before I destroyed it…

——————

He opened and closed the door without saying anything. He placed the bread on the table with a bottle of water, then went to sit on the floor.

I drank the water slowly, ate the bread slower.

“8:53 PM,” He said.

I couldn’t make eye contact, so I couldn’t completely tell if he said it in my direction.

“You can tie my arms back up,” I said.

“It really doesn’t matter as long as the door is closed. If I felt like I was in danger, I would run out before you did anything.”

I looked up to see him playing with the string of his sweatpants, looking down at his lap. There was a giant orange stain on the left leg that had probably been there for years.

“Do you guys really not know what happened to Nick?” I asked.

——————

“Is that the guy that was with you?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“But you haven’t seen a body, right?”

“No body… but we haven’t been searching for one. Just because it’s not right outside doesn’t mean…”

——————

I swallowed the second pill.

“Sandra thinks you might have pneumonia,” He said.

“What does that mean?”

“It’s a respiratory infection.”

“I mean what does it mean for my health?”

“You’d have to ask her. I’m pretty sure it’s not that bad.”

“How trustworthy is she about something like that?”

“She was an LPN. She knows enough random bullshit to prove it. If she’s acting, she could’ve fooled me.”

“Do you commonly have to question if she’s acting or not?”

He didn’t look up, but sneered.

“I don’t know how to save a life, dude. She tries to teach us stuff saying ‘what happens when I die’, but nobody wants to think about that. We’re horses until our legs are broken. I trust her as much as I need to.”

——————

“I used to like talking to you,” I said. “Now I don’t anymore.”

“Have you ever liked talking to anyone?”

It didn’t make me mad.

“I think so.”

He finally looked up at me.

“I don’t trust you,” Elijah said. “I like you. I trust in our ability to manage you, even if you’re erratic.”

“It’s alright, Elijah.”

——————

“What do you mean ‘it’s alright’?”

“I just don’t want to be a burden.”

He stood up.

“You trying to not be a burden is incredibly burdening.”

He sounded just like my-

“Also,” He said. “You’re not a burden in the first place. Arguing on your behalf isn’t the strenuous war-zone you’re making it out to be. I told you the decision is already made…… you seem like you’re tuning me out-“

“-Because I feel like we’ve been talking in circles for the past twenty-four hours. I don’t think there’s anything left to say.”

He grimaced.

“So… you’re done?”

I laughed tiredly and leaned back in the chair.

“How many times have I answered that question?”

He turned around.

——————

“You told her both of your parents are still alive,” He said.

I closed my eyes.

“Please shut up,” I rasped at him.

“And siblings… you have family, right?”

I didn’t respond.

“If you had to guess,” He prodded. “Do you think they’re thinking about you more or less than you’re thinking about them?”

“GOD DAMMIT I’M SO FUCKING SICK OF YOU-JUST SHUT-ohmygodohmygodohmygod-”

He spun around.

“-WHAT, CODY?!”

The lights outside went out as darkness swallowed the room with Elijah in it.

“DID YOU FORGET ABOUT THEM?! DID YOU THINK ABOUT HOW THEY WOULD FEEL IF THEY FOUND OUT THEIR SON JUST GAVE UP LIKE THIS-“

“-they wouldn’t care you fucking tone deaf moron-I can’t believe you’re genuinely speaking those words-you are scientifically damaged-“

“-‘they wouldn’t care’-yeah must be real easy for you to speak for them and call ME the tone deaf moron-“

“-I can’t do it I can’t do it I can’t do it I can’t have another conversation with you say whatever you want-I’m done talking-“

“-BUT WHY?! WHY ARE YOU DONE?! WHAT IS MAKING YOU SO AMAZINGLY EAGER TO DIE-WHY CAN’T YOU DO THIS-“

“-BECAUSE IT’S TOo hard-…”

I broke down. Elijah went silent as I covered my face in my hands and sobbed into my palms.

——————

“‘Doesn’t mean being alive is arrogant’-I can’t believe I said that shit to her. Lizzie will grow up and realize how bullshit it is if she doesn’t already. It’s always arrogant. I’m tired of feeling like that. Of course I don’t want to die… I just don’t want this to be what my life is…. And… being scared to die doesn’t make anything easier to deal with, and hating everything doesn’t make it any less scary to leave. Just one fire after the other, but none of them ever go out. I’m so goddamn exhausted, but….. I don’t want to feel better. I don’t want this place to help me, I don’t want to be helped…….”

——————

I sat there crying, waiting for the moment that the door would open and signal Elijah giving up and leaving.

——————

I felt his torso against my right shoulder, as his arms wrapped around me awkwardly. I guffawed, trying to move away, but he pulled into himself.

“Elijah, both my hands are untied-I will do something that I know will force you to fight me.”

He stayed silent

“Please stop… pLeAsE…”

I started crying harder.

“Don’t do this… I don’t want to…”

He held me for what must have been fifteen minutes as I couldn’t get a hold of myself, periodically cursing and yelling at him between random moans.

——————

My crying faded to heavy breathing as he separated from me and took my right wrist in both hands. I opened my eyes, adjusted to just the smallest orange glow from far outside. It created a blurry outline of his body kneeling down next to the chair, looking up at me.

“Do you remember who Jen is?” He asked.

I sniffed hard to suck my snot up, but still had to wipe my nose on my shirt.

“I…. no….”

His thumb was rubbing my wrist. I don’t think it was to calm me, I think it was his nervous fidget.

“She’s Patrick’s sister… you saw her crying the first night you showed up here… the one that wanted to kick you in the jaw.”

“Oh…. her…. yeah, I remember………. she was his sister?”

“Well, Patrick is dead, not her. She still is his sister…………. Jen is depressed…… ridiculously depressed. She treats Hell like purgatory now. She doesn’t leave her house. Roman brings her food, brings her books, carries around her piss and shit in a drawer to bring it to the bathroom, just like I do with you. He watches her, makes sure she isn’t planning on hurting herself…. but she never goes outside anymore. She spends most of the day asleep or lying awake in bed. Roman has trouble getting ten words a day out of her. She was never the most cheery person here, but she was alive…….. I think the better part of her died with him that night….. maybe the way you said it was right.”

I remember her curled up in Roman’s arms, with the anger and mania that had likely made up a stronger person before that night. I realized why he was telling me this.

Elijah…

"I'm sorry," I said, whining. “I’m sorry I ever showed up….. obviously I wish I never showed up but… I’m sorry to you. I feel like I started a landslide.”

“Alright well, don’t be, and don’t give yourself too much credit. I think that you appearing might have shown us some cracks in a foundation we should have noticed before. I think there's some... unhealthy complacency here that needed to be looked at a long time ago. Maybe I should thank you for that, but don't put your name on any other cause and effect that you think you see."

"Isn't that what you're doing?" I asked.

I saw the outline of his head look up at me.

"You weren't like this the last time you were here... I didn’t handle you right. I'm sorry if I ruined this for you... I'm starting to think that I kind of just do that to people."

"Elijah, a little girl is alive and safe. How I feel now is well worth that. Your fault is nowhere near me. Whatever I feel… somehow I would’ve felt it anyway."

He squirmed.

“Sorry I… I’m not there with you. No one life is worth another.”

I had the sudden intuition that Patrick’s death had put a new Golden Rule into place here. It wasn’t just The Girl’s perspective now, but the new perspective of the commonwealth.

“You could’ve been, and we’re going to be one of us,” He said. “You will be one of us. That means that your life is all of ours to protect. Risking your life for Elizabeth might just seem like it’s protecting one of our own, but I see it as her not doing her part to protect you.”

“She’s a child-“

“-I know I know, I’m being far-fetched, but if it was anybody else’s life you had been saving… I’d stand by that verbatim……. and that is to say…… I wasn’t doing my best before….. I’m sorry if I’m your reason for wanting out.”

——————

“You’re not… but if you were, I don’t accept your jaded ass apology.”

The flicker was just enough to see his lips curling.

“Also,” I said. “You said I will, and I don’t remember this conversation meaning I agreed yet.”

The flicker was just enough to see the smile disappear.

“…… obviously I do though.”

“Why would that be obvious?” He said, mockingly.

I wished he could see me rolling my eyes.

——————

“How…. How do I agree? What am I agreeing to?”

He looked away from me.

“We can talk about tomorrow, but….” He began. “Just make me a deal, and we’ll go from there.”

I waited in response as he looked back.

“For the next five days, you have to try as hard as I’m trying,” He said.

——————

“Okay, I will.”

——————

“Hey… just so I know,” He said. “Was that hug more or less awkward than Roman water-falling you?”

I laughed, I couldn’t help it. It came just as naturally as my tears had.

“More, way fucking more.”

He nodded his head slowly.

“You see how hard my job is trying to be the funny one in this depressing ass place?”

I laughed again, and kept laughing, and for a little bit of time, he laughed with me.

——————

That would be the last time in a long time that I wasn’t outstandingly angry with Elijah.

——————

Pulsing like a waterlogged circuit breaker. Undulating higher above my head and lower beneath ground level every time. Ticking like it’s covered in beaks. A restriction has been enforced in my lungs, and I’m nowhere near getting enough air. Cackling beaks. One million beaks. Regurgitating each other and vomiting into the shape of chains around my ankles. Key is in the middle of the mass. I don’t think it’s worth it. No. I would rather stay shackled and starve alone than ever touch that thing. The moment it’s on my skin, that skin isn’t mine anymore. Beaks and beaks and beaks and beaks. Littering the ruby mess of twisted hemoglobin. One has a blue tongue. Name on the tip. Does anybody else know this is down here? I’m about to tear all of my ears off for it. Even my favorite one is begging to go deaf.

——————

I shot up screaming, immediately scaring myself more with the unfamiliar ability to grasp at my sweaty face.

——————

Cody Camargo: Twenty-four days in.

I think I dreamt of Wyatt last night. I don’t remember, but I suddenly can’t stop thinking about him. About it.

——————

I was shaking for seven million other reasons when it happened, so I guess I hadn’t noticed, but I notice now. You can be “adjusted” by however much you think you’ve seen, but the human brain itself does not like seeing another dead body. I wasn’t going to get away from it so easily, if ever. I was not okay.

I would have to make up for being on Lizzie’s side. I had tried to pass it off like I was insolent in the wake of it. How disrespectful am I to have tried to make a fucking Animal Collective reference with Wyatt’s corpse?

The fear was in my stomach, flush with the face of the great-sword that seemed to be a little duller this morning. I wiped the sweat off my face with my shirt, and noticed that my armpits were soaked. My back felt as though it might look the same. Is it healthy to tell myself that it’s over? It’s just a pile of rotting muscle at the bottom of a hole, it can’t do anything to me.

I’m alive, it’s not.

It’s okay if it affects me, but it can’t touch me anymore.

——————

Am I wrong?

——————

Elijah opened the door.

“You ready?”

I took a deep breath that I was incredibly surprised didn’t knock the trip-wire of a coughing attack.

“I’m ready for you to tell me if I’m ready or not.”

He looked at me closer as he moved up to the table.

“Are you… okay?”

Did I look like a drowning rat?

“I had a nightmare… is this a bad appearance?”

He thought for a second.

“I think it’s actually pretty good…… I’m um…. I’m gonna try and find you some perfume though.”

“You don’t have deodorant?”

He wiggled back and forth.

“They’re not gonna let me give you deodorant. You’ll just have to smell like sweaty flowers.”

——————

He opened the door for me with my arms tied behind my back, now wearing a red t-shirt of his that was just one size too big for me. This one didn’t smell like a locker-room like mine had.

I walked out as he closed the door behind me.

“I’m gonna walk you to the church.”

“Okay….. am I…. gonna have to make a speech? I kinda thought of some stuff to say.”

“Jesus-um…. We’ll see if it comes to that, but I’m mostly just gonna be teeing you up….. you didn’t make flashcards or anything, right?”

We began walking through the village. There were not nearly as many people up and about as the last time Elijah and I had taken this walk. The absence of his crossbow wasn’t exactly enough to make my wristbands dignified, but I felt some level of respect regardless, even as I saw a middle-aged couple holding hands and walking past us. They politely averted their gaze, continuing their normal conversation as if they didn’t notice the prisoner being carted through their town. A morning walk seemed like it wouldn’t be very effective here, but the two had an elegant carelessness that felt so charming.

I looked down a row and caught a scene of a woman and two children. I think I remembered seeing the kids on my first visit, and the woman they were walking with was the one I had handed the body of Lizzie to. She seemed to be scolding them as they danced around her wildly. I still couldn’t imagine a child living here, but the two of them looked so vibrant. Smiling and playful, so happily cliche.

I think I can realize now that that’s everything they’re searching for here. Cliche.

A safe cliche of regular.

That was going to be a really good morale boost for my necessary optimism, until I looked around another corner, and saw something that was very much not regular. I had to focus in, because I was sure I couldn’t have been seeing it right, let alone seeing it. When I realized it was exactly what I thought it was, I jumped out of my skin.

It must have been a ghost, but it made me tense up so violently that my rib began to whine.

“The hell was that?!” Elijah said in response to my jump.

Not now, please not right now…

“I thought I..…”

Think about it later. Not now.

“Hey… before we go,” I said. “You think Sandra has an ice pack I could borrow?”

“Uuuuuuhhhhhh….”

He looked in another direction, a little flustered, then looked back.

“Yes, but… I think we should get weird with it,” He said.

I frowned.

“Huh? What the hell does that mean?”

——————

Elijah’s right hand slipped up my shirt as I walked on my toes.

“Ow-fuckkkk-“

“-I’m not pressing that hard-“ He said.

“-it’s because I’m not controlling it-it’s scaring me. Why is this a good idea?”

“It will make you look vulnerable. That’s a likable quality.”

Elijah was standing directly behind me, with his right hand holding the ice pack on my rib.

“Everyone knows I’m vulnerable, I look that part on my own… also, why do I need likable qualities for a decision that’s ‘already been made’?”

He didn’t answer.

“Elijah!”

“It’s already happening, you’re gonna find out in like sixty seconds.”

That answer was a warning bell that I did not hear.

We approached the awkwardly shaped building that had made me somewhat apprehensive before. To try and describe it, it looked like the first two and a half impacts of a pinball. It started as a plain one story cathedral, but the decorative top above it sloped to one side rather than staying symmetrical. The weirdest part is that it jutted out AGAIN towards the opposite direction, stopping in the middle. The building was mostly the same hodgepodge mix of assets as most others, but seemed to be composed of mostly darker colored materials.

Something deep within me didn’t like this building.

Roman was leaning against the wall as we approached.

“Oh hey, is it just me, or are you super fucking late?” He said to Elijah.

“He was in a little bit of disarray, I had to clean him up.”

Roman looked me up and down.

“He doesn’t look much more presentable.”

“I said clean him up, not doll him up.”

Roman’s eyes fixated on Elijah’s hand sticking awkwardly up my shirt.

“Is he… pregnant?”

“Why? Does he look like he has that natural glow?”

“Can we go inside please?” I interjected.

Roman shivered a little uncomfortably.

“I’m gonna see if they’re ready,” He said, as he slipped in the door.

“You nervous?” Elijah asked me.

“Um… I don’t really know. I thought you said we were gonna talk about this? What exactly am I doing when I go in there?”

“Besides being pretty?”

“…… yes.”

“Making me look good!”

“That’s not really answering my question…”

I looked behind us. Margo was standing nervously by a building across the way from the entrance. She waved at us, smiling wide. I tried to smile at least a little genuinely, but I secretly hoped that she didn’t see I had done it.

I heard the door open behind me.

“Alright, let's go,” Roman said from inside it.

“Hey,” Elijah said over my shoulder. “Why didn’t you wave back?”

I shot him a vicious side-eye.

“Think I could do it if I dislocate my fucking shoulder?”

He cupped his hands around his mouth.

“CODY SAID HE DIDN’T WAVE BACK BECAUSE HE’S REALLY MAD AT YOU ABOUT THE ‘BIG WORDS’ COMMENT!”

I groaned as Elijah pulled my arm to lead me into the church. Roman closed the door behind us as I faced forward to take in the guts of the building. I had to consider the possibility that I was having a stroke. The only arrival of light in the building seemed to be from different groups of four windows placed together into barely larger inlets, so it made everything a little hard to see.

Hard isn’t a good word, unpleasant is better.

The scene was strange enough, but the strange angles of light made everything feel weirdly surreal. The pews were all a random uneven assortment of couches and chairs, all cushioned. It seemed comfier than a normal church, but probably much easier to fall asleep in. The only order to their placement was a somewhat straight, uniform walkway in the middle. The room was not very deep, so the staged threshold of the establishment couldn’t have been very far away, but as we started walking, it felt like it was growing constantly farther and larger from my perspective. I saw seven people scattered around it, most of which I sadly realized I did not want to see. I quickly averted my eyes upwards to what I thought would be an easier picture to perceive. Yet somehow, looking up at the ceiling felt just like looking at a black void with no stars. Just like lying on my back and looking at the endlessly twisting absence of a night sky. It was just something about the architecture. Something about how the light of the windows seemed to stay just to the edge of the first set of rafters, something about the way the building left itself above them, it was maddening.

“Hey,” Elijah said.

“What?” Roman and I said at the same time.

“No not… Roman-you Roman,” He said. “Can you switch off with me here?”

“What? What do you…” Roman began.

Elijah removed the ice pack from my side and handed it to him.

“I can’t exactly be standing behind him the whole time,” Elijah said.

“Wait…” I said.

Roman groaned as he snatched the ice pack from him. Elijah smiled as he ran away from us and up to the other seven.

I stopped walking as I timidly considered running the opposite direction.

“Is um…” Roman began.

I looked to him.

“Is your rib still really bad?” He said without making eye contact.

“You don’t have to-ah okay,” I tried to say before he had returned the ice pack to its place on my side.

He didn’t apply nearly the same amount of pressure, as I could tell he was only doing it to avoid a back-and-forth with Elijah.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” He whispered.

“That’s the fucking question of the hour, dude. I don’t even know what this is.”

The pressure against my rib suddenly intensified.

“Owwwwww, can you please warn me before you-“

I looked down at Roman’s arm, and saw that it was shaking.

“You two!” Elijah called to us as I kept staring down. “¡Ven aqui!”

I began walking as Roman said nothing.

“Roman?”

“Just walk… please,” He said without whispering.

I was not liking where any of this was going. I reached and stepped up on the pulpit.

“Thanks for coming!” Elijah said to me. “I warned them that you’re never on time, so I hope you didn’t worry about rushing.”

“Elijah,” My favorite voice said to my left as I turned. “Can we please start off on a competent note?”

The Girl was standing there, watching him nervously.

I looked around the rest of the party to see the black girl I recognized from Roman’s group, Robert, the creepy motherfucker with the strange birthmark on his arm, a plump man about my height with an incredibly dirty looking beard, a tall man with two cherry red earrings in his right ear, and surprisingly, an old woman that couldn’t have been less than seventy-five years old. She was sitting in a folding chair, smiling at me politely as she played with a Rubik's cube she wasn’t even peeking at. Her boney fingers moved much faster than most people’s could at half her age.

I was incredibly intrigued by that….. but not nearly enough to keep my eyes away from the thing I had been dying to look back at since the moment my eyes had left it. I turned back to my left.

The Girl was wearing a red and black plaid flannel, skinny jeans with the ankles rolled up, long white socks and black converse. Her hair was still wrapped in a ponytail, but tied a couple inches further down than I was used to seeing her wear it.

She looked… really… really fucking good.

Though, she seemed quite uncomfortable. She was standing, bizarrely, incredibly rigid. Her strict, straight posture was articulating the couple-inches taller than me that her usual irreverent body language had never truly shown her to be.

That also looked… really… really fucking-

“Of course we can,” Elijah interrupted my wandering thought process. “Really quick, Cody, I think you should probably meet the people you’ll be speaking with today.”

Elijah began walking around the scattered group of seven.

“Probably shouldn’t let you two get to know each other any better, huh?” He said, motioning to The Girl.

She met eyes with me for a moment as I looked away, no longer idiotically brave before her.

“Yeah, maybe some other time,” He added.

Elijah’s voice had taken on an uncanny quality that I was really not a fan of.

He stepped beside her to the black girl, leaned against the wall with her fingers knotted.

“You’ve met Carolette a couple times already, but here’s your formal introduction. Hopefully you two will spend much more time together soon.”

She threw me a Shaka, half-smiling to me, as I tried not to be too creepy when returning it. I hadn’t before been able to appreciate how pretty she was.

Elijah moved to the man that I realized I was somehow the most scared to make eye contact with.

“You also have… obviously met Robert.”

A side of Robert’s lip curled up nastily to me before he looked away. The part of me that wanted to angrily monologue about that for the next five pages of this journal was silenced. I was incredibly relieved to see that Robert hadn’t immediately welcomed me as his friend, no matter the circumstance.

“Yeah,” Elijah said. “You guys are probably on the same page about that.”

He moved to the man that I did not want to be introduced to.

“Here’s someone I’m pretty sure you haven’t met,” Elijah said, motioning to the creepy birthmark man. “This is Otto-“

“-Nice to finally speak with you,” Otto interrupted happily. “Cody, was it? I’m our priest here at Return & Exchange. I hope the two of us will soon have time to talk in a calmer setting.”

Everybody stared at him strangely for a silent ten seconds.

“Okay…” Elijah said awkwardly. “We aren’t really doing icebreakers but thank you, Otto…”

Elijah awkwardly stepped around him and moved to the man with the… Jesus Christ that beard is so greasy it is literally hard to look at. What the hell is going on in that thing?

“This is Vernon… uh… it feels weird not telling you what people do now so, Vernon is the closest thing we have to a technician, electrician, and engineer. He can show you how the ‘electricity’ in this place works one day.”

Vernon didn’t smile, as Elijah stepped around him even more awkwardly. I couldn’t tell from here, but I had a feeling that Vernon might not smell very good. Elijah put his hand on the shoulder of the tall man as he crossed his arms. He was about Roman’s height, but much lankier, and looked to be middle-eastern.

“This is Tecca,” Elijah said. “Glorified head of the mostly defunct HR department. I have the crazy feeling that you two would get along.”

“We wouldn’t,” Tecca whispered in one of the most soothingly gentle voices I’d ever heard.

He was also unbelievably stunning. Something about his face was just perfectly immaculate, it was kind of unbelievable.

“And of course,” Elijah said as he walked towards the old woman. “We have our crown jewel, and no, she doesn’t like that title. This is Evelyn.”

“Hello, son,” Evelyn said to me warmly. “We’re so glad you’re here.”

Elijah didn’t interrupt her, or shoot her any judging looks as she continued.

“I know you’re probably wondering why an old bat like me is cooped up in here with all these youngins…”

“Vernon is forty, Evelyn,” Carolette said.

“Heh, forty is fresh-faced,” She responded. “How old are you, dear?” She asked me.

“I’m 23,” I replied with a respectful voice I hadn’t anticipated using.

“Really?! You don’t look it at all,” She replied.

She of course neglects to leave out which way she means that.

“Thanks…”

Elijah looks back to me.

“I’m guessing I don’t have to introduce you to the lovable chunk of meat that’s currently nursing your rib back to health?”

Roman switched his weight to his other foot. I fought not to stumble, as just his small uncomfortable shifting had almost thrown me to the ground.

“And me of course…” Elijah continued. “Well, this is The Council!”

“It’s… just the eight of you?”

“Just? This group is cool enough that I have a superhero codename for it, remember?”

“I’m beginning to think that’s just because you’re in it…” I said under my breath.

Tecca stifled a giggle.

“I guess it’s a little meek from the outside looking in,” Elijah said. “I’m hoping it will be taken a little more serious now that there’s nine of us.”

I hadn’t realized that was an intro line for about nine seconds.

——————

“Ww… what did you just say?” I mumbled groggily.

“Alright,” He replied. “Obviously we all know your name pretty damn well by now, but I think you should properly introduce yourself.”

Roman began pushing me forward, catching me before I fell on my face. He walked me to the middle of the circle before stepping away from my sensitive side. Elijah began walking past me as I spoke.

“Elijah?” I said. “Are you being funny?”

I turned around as he had taken a spot up next to The Girl.

“Does it look like we’re standing in a room full of comedically patient people, Cody?”

I spun around 360 degrees like a dog, suddenly incredibly sweaty again. When my eyes returned to Elijah, he was standing closer to her. She closed her eyes for a moment, and as they opened, stared at me with an expression that didn’t make any sense on her face. I fought not to look away.

“We’re starving,” She said.

——————

It didn’t mean anything on paper, and yet, about five trillion puzzle pieces were clicking in the back of my head.

“Starving?” I sputtered.

“Not yet, not really,” Elijah began. “But we’re on our way. I arrived a short while before the end of the golden age where we didn’t have to ration at all. We have a Café inside the walls, if you’re wondering how Margo works her magic. It’s fantastic. Every morning it’s a new endless supply of food and drink… except… R&E started finding out around citizen #104 that it’s actually the one thing in this place that isn’t endless. We can feed a good percentage of our people… but in order to do it steadily, a good amount of us have to survive quite sparsely. We developed a good rotation of that responsibility, nobody is consistently starving to the bone, but the more people that arrive, the harder that gets. I’m sure I don’t have to show you the math. Not only that, but with growing children… long/short, it had became more than a blip on the radar quite a while ago. We’re further below the line of sufficiency than any of us would like to be… but many of us don’t know that. We would very much like to keep it that way. So, what could we do to mitigate? Well, not letting another single person in the gate ever again is a good place to start…… does that sound like a reasonable idea to you, Cody?”

I felt like I couldn’t breathe again. My mental storage was beyond full.

“Speechless? I didn’t think it was that hard of a question to answer,” He continued somewhat obnoxiously. “Well, if you feel hung up on it, don’t be embarrassed… that’s the exact same query that the eight of us have been struggling with for the past year and a half……. But I think that we’ve arrived at a solution… or, and I hate to sound corny here, a solution has arrived to us.”

He hung in silence for a moment.

“….. still waiting for you to introduce yourself,” He said.

——————

I just… couldn’t find the box I left my undying anger in. I should be so fucking mad at Elijah right now. Is it because a pretty giant part of me is not even surprised that he had bullshitted me past the point of shame that I was so sure he wouldn’t cross? Or is it because…

I suddenly realized I had been staring into The Girl’s eyes for almost two minutes straight. Staring at her constricted demeanor. Was it because she was trying to act official as a member of this awfully composed assembly? No, not a chance in Hell. So why was she so restricted right now?

“I…” I began to speak. “I’m confused how I’m a solution to that. I don’t think that eating me would last you more than a couple days.”

I heard Robert huff behind me.

“Yeah, agreed,” Elijah said. “When you left… um… were asked to leave last time, were you able to feed yourself?”

“Y-… yeah. There’s another café like… geez, I don’t know… a couple miles from here?”

“8.1 miles,” Vernon said behind me.

“Is the point-one necessary?” Carolette mumbled, surely not wanting to have a conversation with Vernon.

“You talkin’ waypoint distance now?” Tecca said to him, lacking the same reservation. “Like you’ve even been outside in the past four years-”

“-talking. I’m still talking,” Elijah took back the room to say. “So you know the one. There’s actually another that’s just barely in our range of knowledge around the opposite direction but…. we like to stay away from that one-“

“-Main scavenging café,” I interrupted again. “The main scavenging café-I know, Lizzie said something about it down there. You use it when you run low on food?”

“Weee… have…. in the past. Actualllyyyyy, Patrick used to do it.”

I had a very good idea of where my anger box was now.

“Is that what this abou-“

“-Nonono, Patrick USED to. Like, stopped long before you got here used to. We had made the decision that it was objectively not worth the danger of one of us leaving the walls.”

“…. just one of you? For the sake of… all of you starving? I’m confused how that’s not worth it.”

“Of course you are, because to you, that outside is nothing. You’re perfect for this job!”

I was getting left far behind in this conversation. Elijah was jumping over logical holes, and I didn’t even know which concern to bring up first.

“Sorry… job? Are you offering me a job? Also, what the hell makes you think that the outside is-“

The Girl stamped her foot. I looked at her, expecting her to scream, but she stayed narrow, tugging anxiously at her pockets with both hands.

“It’s not a job, it’s community service,” She said. “You provide us a service… we protect you.”

Goddamit, get mad. Why am I not able to get angry right now?! I wanted my voice to be a horrible wailing when it came out, but it was so careful around her all of a sudden.

“But… why… why are you only doing it now? Why me? I’ve seen what you guys can do out there. Is there something in the daytime I’ve been missing? Why can’t you go when they’re not around so much? There’s enough daylight for that, why not go out in giant armed groups?”

“That’s a risk,” Robert said behind me as I turned around. “It’s always an unknown risk. A risk of valuable people. We won’t expend that just expecting this place to stay predictable every day.”

“Ohhhh okay,” I said with the anger beginning to bubble. “Well don't put me in Mission Control here, but I doubt the food problem is anywhere near dire if that’s a risk you aren’t willing to take.”

“Well, dire is always a strong word,” Elijah said, as I began getting tired of spinning around. “But anything less than good is bad when it comes to this… of course we don’t want anybody to die for it, though. Furthermore, we don’t want to have to indirectly kill anyone for it…. we want to be able to sleep at night……. seems like something you could understand.”

I turned around.

“Let’s all be honest about it,” Elijah said, smiling. “You are expendable. If something happens to you, it is not our problem….. so… if you really want to stay, there’s a way you can.”

I was almost impressed by his general apathy. Almost charmed. I’d found my anger, but it didn’t look appetizing anymore sitting next to my pure disbelief.

“So… what? You want me to fetch-quest for my life?”

“It’d be cool, yeah,” He said. “All you have to do is let us keep an eye on you.”

——————

Someone less persuasive had offered me something a similar way before, but the reward was much greater than the protection of my life.

This was a trap. I knew it was, I just didn’t know how.

Precaution is precaution is precaution, but there was undeniably something pretty big that they weren’t telling me. This place isn’t a playground, but in order for you to only rise to action when what you’re risking is nonessential…

What’s the difference between this speech, and every other one that Elijah gave me in that cell? Of course he’s lying, they’re all lying, and I can’t blame them.

Why would you ever be truthful with someone who is easy to lie to?

To be honest, I was just hoping that the secret was cool.

——————

I shrugged.

Elijah’s smile widened to show his teeth.

“Wanna say what you’d been rehearsing in your room?” He asked.

I squirmed, wincing as I accidentally hurt my rib.

“It’s not… really, uh…… relevant after everything you guys just said.”

Elijah bobbed his head from side to side playfully.

“Relevant-schmelevant. Just share it with the class,” He said.

I hadn’t expected half of “The Council” to be comprised of the people it was. I promise that I hadn’t thought out a massive speech or anything, but the small piece I’d planned to say sounded worlds more embarrassing than I was willing to utter in present company…

“Well, um…..”

…In front of her.

“I wanted to make a demand.”

Evelyn laughed an aged, hollow yet jolly laugh. I guess I didn’t realize that was funny. I couldn’t stop watching The Girl’s fingers, as they tapped wildly on her side. She obviously had something to say that she wasn’t saying.

“Demand?” Robert spoke up.

I wouldn’t have turned around for anyone else, but it felt wrong to let myself get so lazy. I stood face to face with him.

“Yeah… just the one……….. I want to make sure The Dog stays,” I said.

Robert’s head tiled, as if he was trying to diagnose what was wrong with me.

“I… thought I would be on a much more even playing field than I currently am,” I added.

“Enough that you didn’t think to make a request, instead of a demand?”

Robert would likely be quite good at writing this journal.

——————

“I’ll help you… but only because I want to help Elizabeth,” I said to him. “If doing this makes the home she grows up in a better place… I’ll do whatever you people want.”

He sneered, walking forward to stand directly in front of me.

“If we hadn’t told you there were problems, would you have been willing to pull any kind of weight?” He said. “What made you think we had anything to offer you?-“

“-Alright, I… REALLY regret that word choice-I didn’t even know what we were going to be talking about twenty minutes ago… so I would actually like to make a trade. I’ll trade you my soul… for… the dog staying-it’s not like a… physical trade-I should have said deal.”

Robert stared at me coldly.

“Women say anything for attention,” Tecca whispered as Carolette laughed into her hand.

Robert shot him a horrible glare until they both went silent, then returned his eyes to mine. His voice shrunk to a whisper between us.

“…..whether it was your goal or not…. I can’t put thanks into words, so I won’t say it. Just know that it isn’t lost on me.”

Nothing had changed in his eyes, it was still an impenetrable stubbornness as far as could be seen, but that sentiment was real. It moved me in a way that I had often put a price to without ever feeling it before. A voluntary peek at the emotion of a man who does his best to imagine he has none, is something I had searched for to the ends of my smaller Earth. The man who put that desire in me had never shown it.

“That being said,” He continued. “I’ll be looking for any reason I can find to have you ejected. My mind will not change. I do not want you here.”

I couldn’t help but smile.

“Makes two of us…” I said softly.

——————

Robert closed his eyes.

“Aye,” He said so audibly that it made me jump.

“Aye! Godspeed!” Otto said as I looked towards him and immediately wanted to look away.

“Aye-who fucking cares…” Said Vernon.

“Aye guess so,” Tecca said, as I heard Elijah gasp in the background.

“Yeah, aye,” Carolette said, trying extremely hard not to smile.

Everyone was silent for a moment as I realized they were looking at Evelyn. I looked over to see her staring at me, warm as always.

“How soon do you think you’ll die?” She asked me.

——————

“What?”

——————

“If you had to guess how soon you’d be a dead body, what would you say?”

I REALLY wish she hadn’t been smiling when she asked that.

“I….. would hope I don’t have a good answer to that.”

She nodded slowly.

“Aye,” She said so gently.

She stared at me silently with that same fucking smile, her fingers moving insanely around the cube. It went on for so long, as I realized that what I’d thought was warmth was something much different.

“Ahem,” Elijah coughed behind me.

I happily turned around, maybe a little rudely.

“Just wanted to make sure you saw me-okay… Aye-aye captain!” He said. “Was mine as good as Tecca’s,” He whispered in Carolette’s direction.

“Aye…” Roman said warily as I looked at him. “And… the dog can stay……”

I accidentally smiled at him before swishing my lips around to try and make it look like my face had only twitched.

——————

We all slowly looked at her, one by one as she stared away sheepishly. I think she might have even been blushing. It was the first time I had truly noticed the current absence of her gun.

——————

“Aye.”

——————

I hadn’t even noticed Elijah walking over to me as I stayed locked on her eyes. He placed his hands on my shoulders.

“That was genuinely…. way way WAY… less awkward than I thought it was going to be.”

I bashed the back of my head into his nose so hard that I immediately felt it shatter.

Just kidding, but it would’ve been fucking crazy if I did.

——————

Elijah held the door open for me, waving his hand cordially as I exited, and the other seven followed us into the courtyard. The sourceless light that eternally hung in the daytime air felt blinding to my eyes after being cooped up in that darkened building.

“So, what should I be doing about the spot that’s-“ Vernon began.

“-NOT,” Tecca yelped to interrupt him. “… not… right now, Vernon. We’ll talk about it later.”

I looked over to Roman as I heard Otto join their conversation and make me want to stop listening. Roman was guiding Evelyn gently by the hand, a long table leg cane in her other hand, as it was clear that she could walk, but didn’t have much fun doing it. He smiled down to her sweetly. Even after my quick realization of my fear towards her, seeing the giant man that Roman was being so gentle and caring to her felt very… innocent.

“Aren’t they cute?” Elijah said, breezing past me towards Carolette, and Tecca, who had briskly escaped the Otto/Vernon club.

The three of them immediately started smiling and gibbering like it was a normal day. Elijah would hear from me the first chance I had. I was glad the three of them had people like that to be happy around, but watching them gossip after I had just gotten conned into a contract I still didn’t understand the outline of was really opening the box for me.

I had to look away, as I saw Robert pacing away lonely, without having spoken to anyone after we concluded. His stance on me was steadfast. I believed that and… sincerely hoped he did too. Something about his unwavering bias led me to believe that he was possibly the one and only reasonably responsible member of “The Omen”.

That is, besides…

I stopped listening to Elijah offering “All Ayes on me” to Carollette behind me, as I turned and stared at The Girl walking silently away from all of us.

My horrified fascination was newly alive. Elijah wasn’t holding me anymore, as I slowly absconded from his side.

——————

Jesus, am I in ninth grade? What the hell am I thinking?

——————

“Hey! Wait!” I called to her as I moved away from the group.

She turned around and wrinkled her face.

“Dude, what do you want?” She said.

I sprinted up to her, probably looking like a flailing fish with my arms still tied behind my back.

“Sorry, it’s…. could I um…. I was just gonna ask what your name is.”

She gave me a strange look.

“Oh yeah? You think I should tell you?”

She suddenly seemed exceptionally difficult to talk to, and that’s relatively speaking.

“Um… well…. I saved a little girl’s life……”

She stayed silent.

“……. and um…. I told you my name,” I added.

“That wasn’t exactly on your own accord…”

Neither was saving the little girl’s life.

“I mean yeah…. But I don’t think I can get yours out of you the same way so… I was just kinda hoping you would throw me a bone here if we’re gonna be living……. in somewhat close proximity…..”

I quickly realized after saying that, that I had no idea if it was true. She looked extremely unhappy.

“……. Or…. whatever you wanna do…….”

Yet, her face slowly shifted, with a gradient of inquisition that was just about the sexiest thing I’d possibly ever seen in my life. Standing alone in front of her, hands behind my back, vulnerable and distant from the rest of the miscellany… alone with her whispering eyes.

I grew so tired of being guarded.

——————

“………. It’s Natalie.”

She turned around and walked away before I could get another word in.

I felt like I was on fire.

——————

Natalie.

——————

Elijah coughed behind me.

“Very smooth.”

“Shut up, please….” I mumbled absently.

——————

Natalie.

——————

“You done daydreaming? Let's go.”

——————

Natalie.

——————

“Cody!”

“Huh? Yeah, I said yeah!” I yelled, turning around.

“No you fucking didn’t.”

He walked past me, waving his hand to follow.

“You’re not gonna… walk behind me?”

“Were you a part of that meeting in any way, bro?” He said without turning around. “If you wanna get trusted with freedom you have to be given some type of freedom. Let’s start with trusting you to follow behind me for two goddamn minutes with your wrists still roped up.”

I began following, but was only doing it to get us both out earshot of everyone else.

——————

“So, what the fuck are we doing here?” I said. “You and me?…. You, more accurately?”

“Me? Well, I’m gonna put you back in your cage, and then probably go get you some lunch.”

Was I allowed to “confront” him, or did I have to be on my best behavior for the next five days? Does that mean just shutting my mouth about what is obviously wrong with him?

“Okay… do I need to play chess in my mind about whether I think lunch actually means lunch, or a bottle of cleaning products?”

He stopped and swiftly turned around.

“Go ahead, Cody, say it” He said with no smile, but sounding like he was smiling wide. “Let’s get over this hump.”

“Can we get over it? This seems like something I’ll be doing with you every week. I was kind of hoping that you would go ahead. You got anything you want to apologize for?”

He stared at me as his actual smile spread. As if I had any idea what a real smile was from him anymore.

“You wanna talk about playing chess?” He said. “Have you ever played Go? That’s what getting through to you is like. Trying to incept a thought into your brain, trying to turn you on to an idea, trying to get you to even consider the reason in anything, is the most pills-in-the-applesauce level tango I’ve ever had to do. You want me to apologize for something I shouldn’t have had to tell you? If I’m trying to sugarcoat something to a diabetic degree, it’s probably because I’m scared of you killing yourself, more than I am of you killing me….. I was a little focused on keeping you of sound and level mind, more than I was on telling you what we want you to do everyday for the rest of your life.”

The same way that all of you must have been so focused on your sob story that no one had ever said anything about the “rest of my life”.

——————

“So Tecca is part of an HR department?” I said. “You guys must really need that when people like you and Natalie exist, huh?”

I walked past him, already knowing the rest of the three turns back to the cell. I heard him giggle slightly, followed by his footsteps trailing after mine.

——————

Elijah let me into the room, but grabbed my arm before I could walk to the table. I didn’t speak as he untied my wrists. My hands came free as I rubbed my arms.

“You should walk around a little before lunch,” He said. “Get some exercise.”

I walked away from him.

“I’m not very hungry right now… I just want water.”

He stayed silent for a while.

——————

“Robert’s not a very good whisperer, ya know?” He said as I refused to turn around.

“…. And?”

He swayed back and forth.

“I think I should tell you that the vote to cast you out was originally unanimous amongst that same group.”

I turned just enough to side-eye him.

“If that’s the kind of ‘truth’ you’re looking for out of me…” He added.

——————

He closed the door, slamming the lock behind him and leaving me standing alone in the cell.

I stood motionless for about twelve minutes before beginning to pace around. It took about ten seconds for me to start hacking. I stumbled to lean on the wall as I rode out the storm.

——————

I came out on the other side deeply breathing, without coughing up any blood.

Still standing. Still awake. Still alive.

——————

Alright, back to walking.

(Part eight coming soon!)

Okay, I’m back. Ya know, back to throw this up and then be gone for ages again. What excuse can I use this time, the holiday season? Hell yeah I can! Happy Halloween, happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year!!!! Hope you had a better time than I did. Also, let’s be real, Thanksgiving is thrashing Christmas as the better holiday, can we start saying Merry Thanksgiving too? Christmas is annoying. Alright, what else can I say to show how irritating of a person I am to be around?

In all seriousness, thank you so much to any of you that come back and read these. This is STILL longer than I wanted it to be, but I’m just glad that it isn’t the biggest part by a longshot. I like this part a lot because I finally get to let the people of R&E begin to reveal themselves. I’m so excited for you to meet them. ALSO, SHE TOLD HIM HER NAME. Yeah, I know it’s annoying to read with me awkwardly using a non-title for such a central character who I’m not allowed to say the name of. I don’t know if anyone noticed, but my editorial work is so bad that I actually accidentally left Natalie’s name in somewhere back in part three, lol. It’s been long edited out now, but I remember posting it, rereading it about a week later and losing my shit at myself. That must be how you guys feel reading all of this.

Alright, fact time? Feel like I’ve already run out of stuff. I live at 974 Hendlebrook Lane, Omaha, NE 68007 I’M KIDDING I JUST MADE UP THE STREET NAME I HOPE THAT’S NOT A REAL PLACE PLEASE DON’T MAIL ANY PIPE BOMBS. I guess I can say that my favorite video game is Portal 1&2 (it’s hard to not see them as the same game, it will be easier when 3 comes out WHICH IT WILL JUST LIKE HL3 WILL READ THE SIGNS IT’S FUCKIN HAPPENING)

Okay, really quick, just want to say that the real reason these take so long is because I’m horrible at sitting down and writing. I have a lot of other stuff I’m forcing myself to focus on, but there are a lot of days I somehow end up focusing on none of them. The best motivator for me sitting down and writing is the realization that it’s already been a month since the last time a section of this story was finished. I’m having a lot of fun writing this, but I’ve got really bad distraction issues, so seriously, thank you thank you thank you if you take the time to read these long-ass submissions. The next one WILL NOT take so long… you can’t see if I have my fingers crossed or not to say that. I mean, I don’t, because it would be hard to do that whilst typing.

Alright, I’m typing this setn sentence with them crossed on bothb ha nds snd not fixig any mstaks .

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back soon, and more importantly, I hope you guys enjoyed it. Stay safe!

BYE!!!

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